Yes, she thought. All those thunderstorms with Gar standing in the doorway of the barn, watching the sky. A knot inside her relaxed. Claude hadn’t known a different Gar, just a younger one. She laughed. Unbelievably, she laughed. Later she’d cried, of course, the way a person cries when a salve is finally applied to a burn. But most miraculous of all, she’d rested that night for the first time since Gar had died.
The next day she called to Claude from the porch door and poured him coffee. She’d asked whether they had ended up going out into the snow after all, or had they waited until morning. She felt she was treading some dangerous ground, that if she pulled too hard (and that was her instinct-to seize the thread of story Claude had offered and yank it with all her might) it would silence him. A seduction of sorts began. Yes: sexual. He wanted that more than she, but she wasn’t unwilling. They weren’t exactly trading one thing for the other. True, sometimes when she ran out of questions, she found herself leading him into the bedroom, and there was always an element of gratitude about the act. But there was selfishness as well. And at night, she slept. She blissfully slept.
The irony was, the more Claude’s memories of Gar released her from the haunting she felt, the more they’d occupied Claude. By listening to his stories, Trudy was finally able to say goodbye-goodbye to the young Gar, the teenaged Gar, the Gar she had never known but had, somehow, expected to know. Claude spoke about his older brother in a clear-eyed, unsentimental tone. She learned things that only a brother could know, particularly a younger brother who had grown up in Gar’s shadow, studying him, copying him, worshipping him, and fighting horrendously with him.
How could she explain any of that to Edgar? How could she say that she needed Claude because Claude knew Gar and wasn’t destroyed by his death? How could she say that when she missed Gar most she talked to Claude and he told her stories and for a moment, she remembered, really remembered, that Gar had existed. How could she explain that she could get out of bed in the morning if there was a chance she might touch Gar again?
AND SLOWLY, SHE LEARNED about Claude. The great distracter. He took an almost malevolent pleasure in tempting the dogs while she trained them. One day, when she was proofing recalls, he walked across the yard with a cardboard box filled with squirrels-not that she knew it at the time. When the dogs had crossed halfway to her, he yanked open a flap and three gray streaks shot across the lawn. The dogs had wheeled and chased.
“Okay,” she said, laughing. “How’d you do that?”
“Ah. Ancient Chinee secwet,” he said.
Claude’s gift-if that’s what it could be called-was all the more baffling for its effortlessness. He seemed to know every human recreation within a day’s drive. Unsolicited, people bore news to him of celebrations, large or small. Everything from the feed mill codgers’ plan to sample the diner’s new meat loaf to baseball games and back-alley fights. That very evening they had set out to buy groceries in Park City and ended up at, of all things, a wedding reception in someone’s backyard, the friend of a cousin of a man Claude had once met at The Hollow. Just for an hour, Claude had promised, though it had been close to midnight when they’d driven home. As an orphan, handed from relation to relation a half dozen times before she was twelve, Trudy could wield an insular self-reliance, but how could she not be charmed when a group of near-strangers welcomed them-people she’d lived among for all these years but had never met. How could that be?
Comparing Claude and Gar was a bad idea, she knew, but in this way they were such opposites. Gar had, if anything, repelled commotion, even happy commotion, in favor of a passionate orderliness. Those breeding records-so many drawers overflowing with log sheets, photographs, notes, pedigrees-Gar loved them. He’d believed as fervently in the power of breeding as she believed in training-that there was nothing in a dog’s character that couldn’t be adapted to useful work. Not changed, but accommodated and, ultimately, transformed. That was what people didn’t understand. Unless they had worked long and hard at it, most people thought training meant forcing their will on a dog. Or that training required some magical gift. Both ideas were wrong. Real training meant watching, listening, diverting a dog’s exuberance, not suppressing it. You couldn’t change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow. This was a debate she and Gar had cheerfully never resolved. Gar claimed her training successes proved that his records, properly interpreted, brought each new generation of pups closer to some ideal, even if he could not put that ideal into words. Trudy knew better. The training had, if anything, gotten more difficult over the years.
But Claude paid those files scant attention. To him, they were nothing more than a means to an end. He was more interested in catching the eye of the Carruthers catalog people after the branch kennel arrangement fell through with Benson, the man from Texas, who’d witnessed enough the night Edgar had run to be apprehensive instead of enthusiastic.
Perhaps the diversions were no accident. Whenever she began to brood, Claude practically leapt to draw her away, toward wine and music, things immediate and uncomplicated. A movie in Ashland. Back road drives through bosky glades. A walk by the falls, where the Bad River crashed through granite sluices with an engulfing roar. She’d given in to that last idea more than once; standing on the footbridge across that gray chasm, he’d produced a flask of brandy and they’d watched the water clench its fist in the air and drop away. After he’d taken a few turns at the brandy, he’d murmured, “Mid these dancing rocks at once and ever, it flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion, through wood and dale the sacred river ran, then reached the caverns measureless to man, and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.”
He moved the old record player from the workshop to the house. He loved music of any kind-Big Band, Elvis, the Rolling Stones. Only classical music bored him with its orderly sterility. Most especially, he adored voices-crying, pleading, laughing voices-and the great melodious singers were his favorites, whether they radiated unrestrained longing or sultry indifference. He liked Frank Sinatra for his brute power. He liked Eydie Gormé for her bright untouchability. (“Blame It on the Bossa Nova” got him ridiculously worked up.) But he held a special fondness for crooners-Perry Como for example, or Mel Tormé, whom Trudy despised. Whenever Claude dropped the needle on a Mel Tormé record he’d announce, in a hushed voice, “It’s the Velvet Fog!” and give Trudy a wide-eyed stare, as if they’d found themselves trapped in a scene from a horror movie. But that was Claude-tricking her into laughing precisely because she resisted. It made her a little angry, though she ended up wishing he’d do it again, like a girl clapping and crying out for the magician to release another dove from his sleeve. Only with Claude, the dove seemed to come from inside her.
(She was in that twilight of quarter-consciousness where notions crack and drift like floes of ice. Claude lay behind her, solid, heavy, hot. She was glad he had checked the kennel. The first news she would have to give Edgar was of Almondine; how vulnerable he would be to it. She must call Glen Papineau tomorrow. But if there’d been news, he would have driven out to tell them in person. And she had to be careful; every time she asked, she chanced making the connection between Edgar and Page’s accident stronger in Glen’s mind.)