EDGAR FORCED HIMSELF TO turn away from the house, and away from the real, living dogs on the ground at his feet. Those dogs could take care of themselves for the few minutes it would take him to do what he had in mind. He ran to the front barn doors and rolled the heavy iron brace bar away and pulled the doors open. A billow of gray smoke engulfed him, carrying with it the smell of roasting straw and wood. He stepped back. After a minute the smoke leveled out around five feet above the barn floor.

If he stayed low, under the ceiling of smoke, he could easily reach the workshop door. The cabinets themselves would be impossible to move, but he could carry out individual files. The most valuable would be the newest, going back five generations. How many times could he go in? How many files each trip? They would get scrambled, but there would be time later to sort them out. He permitted himself a quick look at the porch steps. His mother stood facing Claude and Glen.

“How did you know, Glen?” she cried. “Tell me how you knew Edgar was here.”

Claude was standing beside Glen on the steps. He leaned over and began to say something.

“Shut up, Claude. Shut up. I want to hear this from Glen.”

But Glen sat silently rocking and grinding the towel against his face. Trudy knelt and put her hands on either side of Glen’s massive head and wrenched it toward her.

If Edgar watched even a moment longer he thought he would run toward the house, toward Claude, and then there would be no hope. He began drawing the deepest breaths he could, and before the doubts and second-guesses could begin, he ran into the smoldering barn.

HOT SMOKE BILLOWED over his back. The sole light bulb, at the far end of the barn, flickered between folds of smoke. Walking, he might have crossed the distance to the workshop in a few seconds, but with his head down and peering about for flames, it took much longer. He touched the handle of the workshop door and rubbed his thumb over his fingertips, like a safecracker, to take the temperature. Warm, but no warmer than anything else in the barn. He swung the door open. Smoke sucked into the darkness and equalized between the aisle and the workshop.

His eyes began to itch and a stream of tears leaked onto his face. He scrambled through the doorway and flipped the light switch and the bulb in the ceiling fixture came on. He breathed a little sigh of relief. He knew the room so well he could find his way to the file cabinets in total darkness, but he wouldn’t be able to locate the records he wanted just by feel, and there was no time to find the flashlight.

He opened the highest drawer of the rightmost file cabinet. A solid mass of paper, divided a hundred times, came toward him, the tab edges on the tops of the manila folders running in a long, ragged hump down the center and each penciled with a name. Cotton. Vesta. Hoop. Frog. He drove his hands into the mass, awkwardly lifting out a swath, and in the process scattering notes and photographs and paper clips. He left them and turned and scuttled through the doorway and down the aisle. The papers were heavy and they slid dryly against one another in his arms. Then he was in the yard, in the clear air. At the far edge of the lawn he stopped and bent and spilled the papers onto the ground.

And for the briefest instant, Edgar felt something new, something impossible and wholly out of place. A sense of elation. As if he’d somehow traveled back to the moment his father lay on the workshop floor and found the thing that could save him. Then, just as quickly, the sensation was gone. Something in him clamored for it again, at once. He ran to the barn and flailed heedlessly through the smoke and filled his arms with another pack of manila folders and all the papers and photographs inside them. He’d almost reached the double doors when the cement floor surged upward; he saw it tilting at him but there was no time to recover and he smashed shoulder-first into the hinges of the right-hand door, kicking as he fell and clutching the papers to his chest.

The impact brought him to his senses. He lay for a time half in and half out of the barn. After a few breaths of clear air he pushed to his feet and staggered into the grass. When he reached the folders he’d already rescued, he bent at his waist and let the papers flutter and splash to the ground.

Remember me.

Far in the distance, his mother’s voice.

“Edgar! Stay out of there!”

She was standing by the porch. Glen had gripped her wrist in one giant hand like a straw in a vise. Edgar looked at her and shook his head. There was no time to argue. She couldn’t feel what he felt or hear what he heard. She wouldn’t understand the rightness of it. There were no words for the sensation that had washed through him.

His mother would have run forward to stop him, but she couldn’t break Glen’s grip. She whirled and began to beat at Glen’s face with her free hand. It brought the enormous man to his feet. He was confused and in terrible pain and he stood thrashing his head side to side to avoid her blows. His stance was wide-legged and low. And then, in one fluid motion, he swept one of his thick legs under hers and folded her up in his arms and together they toppled onto the grass. By the time they came to rest, Glen had scissored his legs over hers.

“What’s happening?” Glen said. His voice was filled with pain and fear but not the slightest hint of physical effort, as if all those wrestler’s reflexes had come forward of their own volition to protect him. “Why won’t anyone help me?” he cried. “Doesn’t anyone understand I can’t see?”

Edgar took a breath and turned away. The last thing he saw was the entwined figures of Glen Papineau and his mother, as she twisted and fought in his arms. And Claude, standing on the porch steps above them.

HE TROLLEYED ALONG PALM and knuckle into the workshop, careful now to stay below the strata of smoke, holding his breath as long as he could until it burst out of him. He was able to get the remainder of the first drawer’s files. Coming out with his arms filled, it was much harder to stay low. His eyes teared and the light in the workshop became a greasy blur of yellow and gray. He had to be careful not to gulp the air. The crashing dizziness of his last attempt was warning enough. Even so, he felt smoke burning along his windpipe and in his lungs. Outside, he spilled the papers onto the ground and dropped to his knees. He supposed a normal person would have been coughing, but all he felt was a strange wooziness. He bent and forced himself through the motions, hacking and gasping to drive the smoke out of him.

He looked up to find Essay standing before him, tail flagging. Her ears were up high on her head, fully attentive, eyes gay and glittering. The same expression she’d worn parading around the cove after the tornado. She looked prepared to follow him into the barn. He took her ruff in his hands to shake her down, scare her away, then stopped himself. They were done with commands. He put his hand under her belly and drew her attention into him.

Away, he signed, pouring into the gesture all the force he could muster. I know you understand. I know it’s your choice. But please. Away!

Essay backed up a step, eyes intent on him. She looked at the other dogs circling under the apple trees. Then she faced Edgar again and bucked a little and held his gaze.

Yes, he signed. Yes.

She bounded forward and swiped her tongue across his face and bolted into the mass of dogs, all of them up now and running, even the ones Edgar’s mother had stayed. He wanted desperately to know if Essay had understood him, but short of giving up on the records and rushing after her, there was no way to be sure.

He turned back to the barn. He had almost passed through the wide double doors and into the smoky interior when he thought of the milk house and what he would find sitting inside it. He crossed along the front of the barn and when he reached the milk house door he flung it open.