The Letters from Fortunate Fields
T HERE FOLLOWED, FOR EACH OF THEM, GOOD DAYS AND BAD, and often Edgar’s best moments coincided with his mother’s worst. She could be cheerful and determinedly energetic for days on end and then one morning he would walk downstairs and find her hunched at the kitchen table, haggard and red-eyed. Once lapsed, nothing could deliver her. It worked the same with him. Just when normal life felt almost possible-when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.
He returned from school one day in March to find his mother working in her bedroom, her hair a sweaty tangle about her head, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She’d already closed up the flaps on a tall stack of boxes and was folding a pair of his father’s trousers and placing them in another box. Her gaze barely paused on Edgar when he walked in. Later, he searched to see what had been lost. The drawer that once held his father’s belts and ties was filled with his mother’s gloves and scarves. On top of the dresser, only her sparse jewelry collection remained, and the wind-up alarm clock. She’d even packed away the photograph of her and his father, newlyweds, sitting on the pier in Door County.
HE WOKE ONE MORNING tantalized by an idea: if he could catch the orchard trees motionless for one second-for half of one second-if they stood wholly at rest for the briefest moment-then none of it would have happened. The kitchen door would bang open and in his father would walk, red-faced and slapping his hands and exclaiming about some newly whelped pup. Childish, Edgar knew, but he didn’t care. The trick was to not focus on any single part of any tree, but to look through them all toward a point in the air. But how insidious a bargain he’d made. Even in the quietest moment some small thing quivered and the tableau was destroyed.
How many afternoons slipped away like that? How many midnights standing in the spare room, watching the trees shiver in the moonlight? Still he watched, transfixed. Then, blushing because it was futile and silly, he forced himself to walk away.
When he blinked, an afterimage of perfect stillness.
To think it might happen when he wasn’t watching.
He turned back before he reached the door. Through the window glass, a dozen trees strummed by the winter wind, skeletons dancing pair-wise, fingers raised to heaven.
Stop it, he told himself. Just stop.
And watched some more.
THE WORK TO BE DONE was staggering.
Simplest was the maintenance of the kennel: cleaning the pens, feeding and watering the dogs, shoveling snow from the runs, and the infinity of minor repairs on the kennel’s mechanical workings. Then there was nursery duty: checking the pregnant mothers, washing the teats of the nursing and weaning mothers, taking the temperature and weights of newborns. For the blind and deaf neonates there were touch and scent regimes to be followed, neatly penciled in Gar’s hand on a yellowing paper tacked to the whelping room wall. For the newly open-eyed, there was a schedule of experiences, from the jingling of car keys to the appearance of an old bicycle horn, which they might sniff until Edgar squeezed the rubber bulb and timed how long before they crept back. A patch of carpet to walk on. A tube. A block. Sandpaper. Ice. The weekly roll-and-hold until they kicked and yipped, keeping one eye on the second hand of the clock. The sessions with aunts and uncles, learning manners, while the mother rested. For everything there were entries on log sheets, milestones checked off, reactions recorded, charts updated, the compiled story of each life. Photographs at four, six, eight, and twelve weeks, and then six and nine and twelve and eighteen months: frontal, lateral, rear, and orodental on Tri-X, the dogs positioned in front of the painted calibration grid on the medicine room wall. At night, there was the house rotation schedule, bringing in pairs or trios, and the pedigree research, and visits by stud dogs, and the heat schedules of the mothers, and the practice placements and negotiations with potential owners.
But it was the training that consumed them. The infants needed to learn the simplest things: to look, to listen, to watch, to wait. The eighteen-month-olds needed finish work and evaluation. And the adolescents-those robbers, thieves, muggers, and bullies, who knew exactly what you wanted and devoted themselves to the opposite-needed every spare minute and more.
One evening after they had come in from the kennel, Edgar’s mother asked him to sit at the table. On a sheet of paper, she’d drawn a schedule with columns labeled “Edgar” and “Trudy.”
“We need to divide up the work,” she said. “We’re both doing everything right now. I’m not so worried about the nursery-Pearl’s an experienced mother, and she won’t need much watching. But I am worried about placing them. Your father spent so much time on the telephone. I have a lot of catching up to do.”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“And all that is going to detract from the training. The only bright side to the whole thing is that oldest litter is completely placed. That gives us a few months of breathing room. Then the next litter to go is yours. I don’t think they’ve been spoken for.”
She looked at him to double-check this. He nodded. His father hadn’t broached the issue of placing Edgar’s litter and it wasn’t something Edgar had been eager to hurry along.
“We have a few months then. I need to go over the contacts. For all I know, Gar had spoken agreements with people. I hope I won’t need to travel-I don’t know how we’ll manage if I do.”
She was thinking out loud. He let her go on and sat listening. Then she stopped short and turned to him.
“There is another option, Edgar, and we need to talk about it. We can sell the breeding stock and shut down the kennel. After these litters are placed, we would be done. We could probably place them all by the end of summer if we wanted to. We would have to move into town. I’m sure I could-”
He was already shaking his head.
“No, listen. We have to consider it. We’re going to have to work so hard there’ll be no time for anything else. Have you thought about what that will be like? In a year or so you’ll want to go out for track or football. You might not think so now, but when other boys are doing those things you’re going to resent being stuck out here handling dogs morning and night. What I’m afraid of is that there’ll come a time when you hate getting on the bus to come home. And I’ll know it when it happens.”
It won’t happen, he signed. I don’t want to live somewhere else.
“That’s the other thing. This isn’t always going to be your home. In four years, you graduate. I can’t possibly run this kennel alone, and even if I could, I’m not going to live out here by myself. Five years one way or another doesn’t matter much, Edgar.”
It matters to me. Besides, how do you know I’m going to leave?
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to college”
I’m not. I’m haven’t even thought about college.
“You will,” his mother said. “You need to understand that there are alternatives. You’re being closed-minded. Staying here and working dogs might be the hardest thing, not the easiest. Or the best. As a trainer, you’re no great shakes, Edgar. Sleeping with them in the mow doesn’t accomplish much, no matter how nice it feels.”
Edgar felt himself blushing.
“It’s not so hard to guess what’s going on when there’s silence up there for hours and you come stumbling down with straw in your hair. I know how tempting it is. I’ve done it myself.”