The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“No,” Ida Paine grunted, with some finality.

“Not ever?”

“He can use his hands.”

By then the whine of car tires had faded into the night. Orange worms of plasma began to flux and crawl in the tubes of the OPEN sign. Overhead, the ballasts hummed and the fluorescents flickered and lit. Trudy waited for some elaboration from Ida, but understood soon enough that she stood in the presence of a terse oracle indeed.

“That it?” was all the more Ida Paine had to say. “Anything else?”

A MONTH LATER A WOMAN came to visit. Trudy was in the kitchen fixing a late lunch while Gar tended a newly whelped litter in the kennel. When the knock came, Trudy walked to the porch, where a stout woman waited, dressed in a flowered skirt and a white blouse, her steel gray hair done up in a tightly wound permanent. She gripped her handbag and looked over her shoulder at the kennel dogs raising the alarm.

“Hello,” the woman said with an uncertain smile. “I’m afraid you’re going to think this very inappropriate. Your dogs certainly do.” She smoothed down the front of her skirt. “My name is Louisa Wilkes,” she continued, “and I—well, the fact is, I don’t exactly know why I’m here.”

Trudy asked her to come inside, if she didn’t mind Almondine. She didn’t mind dogs at all, Louisa Wilkes said. Not in ones and twos. Mrs. Wilkes settled on the couch and Almondine curled up in front of the bassinet where Edgar slept. Something about the prim way she walked and folded her hands when she sat made Trudy think she was a southerner, though she had no accent Trudy could detect.

“What can I do for you?” Trudy said.

“Well, as I said, I’m not sure. I’m here visiting my nephew and his wife—John and Eleanor Wilkes?”

“Oh yes, of course.” Trudy said. She had thought the name Wilkes sounded familiar, but hadn’t been able to place it. “We see Eleanor in town once in a while. She and John look after one of our dogs.”

“Yes, that was very the first thing I noticed, your dogs. Their Ben is a wonderful animal. Very bright eyes,” she said, looking at Almondine, “like this one. Same way of peering at you, too. In any case, I talked them into lending me their car for the morning so I could see the countryside.

I know it’s odd, but I like the quiet of a car when I’m alone in it. A ways back I found myself at a little store, practically in the middle of nowhere. I’d hoped they sold sandwiches, but they didn’t. I bought some crackers instead, and a soda. The store is run by the strangest woman.”

“You must be talking about Popcorn Corners,” Trudy said. “That’s Ida Paine’s store. Ida can be a little spooky.”

“So I discovered. After I paid the woman she told me I wanted to follow the highway a bit farther and take this side road and look for the dogs. It was strange. I hadn’t asked for directions. And that’s the way she put it, too: not that I should, or could, but that I wanted to. She said it through the window screen as I was walking to my car. I asked her what she meant but she just sat there. I intended to turn back the way I came, but then I was curious. I found the road just where she said it would be. When I saw your dogs, I—” She broke off. “Well, that’s all there is to tell. I parked on the road and now here I am, feeling loony for having walked in.”

Louisa Wilkes looked around the living room, fidgeting with her purse. “But I do have the feeling we should talk some more. You’re a new mother,” she said. She walked to the bassinet and Trudy joined her.

“His name is Edgar.”

The baby was wide awake. He scrunched his eyebrows at the unhappy sight of a woman not his mother leaning over him and he stretched his mouth wide, making silence. The woman frowned and looked at Trudy.

“Yes. He doesn’t use his voice—the equipment is all there, but when he cries, there’s no sound. We don’t know why.”

At this, Louisa Wilkes stood up straight. “And how old is he?”

“Just shy of six months.”

“Is there a chance he’s deaf? It’s very simple to test for, even in infants. You just—”

“—clap your hands and see if they flinch. Yes, we’ve known from the start that his hearing is fine. When he’s in his bassinet and I start to talk, he looks around. Why do you ask? Do you know of another case like his?”

“I’m sure I don’t, Mrs. Sawtelle. I’ve never heard of anything like it.

What I do know about—well, first of all, I’m not a nurse, much less a doctor.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’m out of patience with doctors. All they’ve told us is what isn’t wrong with Edgar, and that amounts to everything besides his voice. They’ve tested how fast his pupils dilate. They’ve tested his saliva. They’ve drawn blood. They’ve even taken EKGs. It’s amazing what they can rule out on a newborn, but I’ve finally had to draw the line—I won’t have my baby tormented all through his infancy. And all you have to do is spend a few minutes with him to know he’s a perfectly normal baby.”

Almondine was up now, scenting the bassinet and their visitor with equal concern. Mrs. Wilkes looked down at her. “Benny is such an extraordinary animal,” she said. “I’ve never seen a dog quite so aware of conversation. I could swear he turns toward me when he thinks it is my turn to speak.”

“Yes,” Trudy said. “They understand more than we give them credit for.”

“Oh, it’s more than that. I’ve been around plenty of dogs—dogs that lie on your lap and fall asleep, dogs that bark at every stranger who walks past, dogs that crouch on the floor and watch you like a long-lost beau. But I’ve never seen a dog behave that way.”

Louisa Wilkes looked at Edgar in the bassinet. Then she turned and lifted her hands and moved them through the air, looking intently at Trudy. Her motions were fluid and expressive and entirely silent. She paused long enough to be sure that Trudy realized what she had seen, even if she hadn’t understood its meaning.

“What I just said is, ‘I am the child of two profoundly deaf parents.’”

Another swift flight of hands.

“I am not deaf myself, but I teach sign at a school for the deaf. And I’m wondering, Mrs. Sawtelle, what will happen if it turns out that your boy lacks the power of speech but nothing else.”

Trudy noticed how deftly Louisa Wilkes phrased her questions, a steeliness that emerged the moment she signed. Something almost fierce. Trudy liked that—Louisa Wilkes wasn’t beating around the bush. And Trudy could hardly have forgotten Ida Paine’s pronouncement that autumn night: He can use his hands. At the time, Trudy thought Ida Paine had meant that Edgar would only be able to use his hands, that he was destined for menial work, which Trudy knew was wrong. The whole episode had made her angry, and she’d chalked it up to foolishness—her own. She’d never mentioned the incident to Gar. Now Trudy began to suspect she’d misunderstood Ida Paine.

“He’ll make do, Mrs. Wilkes. I think we’ll find out that there’s nothing else different about Edgar. Perhaps, as he grows, his voice will come. Since we don’t know why it’s gone in the first place, there’s no way to tell if this is temporary.”

“He’s never uttered a sound? Not even once?”

“No, never.”

“And the doctors—what did they tell you to do while you’re waiting to find out if your son might or might not find a voice?”

“That’s been so discouraging. They’ve told me only the most obvious things. To talk to him, which I do, so if he has a choice, he’ll imitate his mother.”

“Did they suggest any exercises? Anything you might do with him?”

“None, really. They speculated on what we might do in a few years if nothing changes, but for now, just watch him. If—when something changes, we go from there.”

Hearing this, Mrs. Wilkes’s reserve, rapidly diminishing ever since the topic had turned to deafness, dropped away entirely.

“Mrs. Sawtelle, listen to me now. I don’t mean to presume anything, and for all I know what I’m about to tell you you’ve already read or been told—though from the sound of it, the doctors you’ve seen have been woefully ignorant, which would not surprise me at all. You cannot begin too early to bring the power of language to children whose grasp may be precarious. No one can say for sure when children begin to learn language—that is, we do not know how early in their lives they understand that they can talk and should talk, that through speech they will lead fulfilling lives. There is, on the other hand, evidence that by the age of one year the gift of language begins slipping away unless it is nurtured. This has happened to deaf children throughout history, and it is quite a terrible thing—children considered retarded and left to fend for themselves—I’m talking about perfectly intelligent, capable children abandoned because they did not know that sound existed. How could they! By the time someone recognized that they lacked only hearing, they were handicapped forever.”

“But everything you say applies to children who can’t hear, not to children who can’t make sound. And there’s no doubt that Edgar can hear.”

“But what about speech? A person communicates by giving as well as taking, by expressing what is inside. Infants learn this by crying—they learn that drawing attention to themselves in even the most primitive way gains them warmth and food and comfort. I worry about your child, Mrs. Sawtelle. I wonder how he’ll learn these things. Let me tell you about myself for a moment. When I was born, my own parents were faced with a dilemma: how could they teach me to speak? They had not learned until it was far too late—in their teens—and so they mastered everything but the production of intelligible speech. And now they had a daughter who they wanted more than anything in the world to speak normally.”

“What did they do?”

“They assumed that I was learning even when I seemed to be doing nothing. They played records with conversations, though they couldn’t hear anything themselves. They bought a radio, and asked their hearing friends to tell them which stations to tune in, and when. They watched my mouth to see if I was making sounds. They arranged for me to spend time with people who could play with me and speak to me. In short, Mrs. Sawtelle, they made sure that verbal language was available to me in every way they could imagine.”

“But there must have been more to it than that. How did they respond when you spoke your first words? How did they encourage you when they couldn’t hear you speak?”

Mrs. Wilkes talked then about the readiness of babies to learn language, how impossible it was to prevent, so long as examples were available. How isolated twins sometimes invented private languages. She went on for quite some time. She had worked with both deaf children and the hearing children of deaf parents, she said, and there was a simple principle: the baby wanted to communicate. It would learn whatever was given as an example, whether English, French, German, Chinese, or sign. As a child, she had learned to sign as well as speak, almost effortlessly. This last point, she said, was most significant for the Sawtelle baby.

“But how can I teach him to sign?” Trudy said. “I don’t know how myself.”

“Then you will learn, together,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “At first, you only need to know enough to talk with Edgar in the simplest ways.”

“Which are?”

“Which are to tell him you love him. To say, here is food. To name things: Dog. Bird. Daddy. Mama. Sky. Cloud. Just like any child. Show him how to ask for things he wants by moving his hands in that sign. Show him how to ask for more of whatever he wants”—and here she bounced the fingertips of both hands together as she talked, to demonstrate—“and later, when the time comes to make sentences, you’ll already have learned how to do that.”

Their conversation went on late into the evening. When Gar came in from the kennel, Mrs. Wilkes began demonstrating the basics. She said she could explain a few signs and straightforward syntax in an evening, and she began with simple words and simple sentences. She showed them a subject-verb-object sentence: “Trudy loves Gar.” She explained the miraculous way in which pronouns are used. She demonstrated an adjective.

Trudy was mesmerized, repeating the signs and following Mrs. Wilkes’s corrections studiously. Gar tried as well, though he lacked Trudy’s coordination and grace. It was near midnight before the woman left—far past the time when they usually went to sleep. Edgar had roused several times during the evening, and when they took him up, Mrs. Wilkes demonstrated how to say “food” and move Edgar’s hands. This was harder, since it required performing the sign backward. But it was possible. And Trudy understood the enormous leverage that practice gives the determined trainer.

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.