His mother emerged from the whelping room. She had a young pup with her, spinning and biting at its leash. “There you are,” she said, then broke off to correct the pup. When she’d finished she was kneeling too and she looked over at him.

“Good grief,” she said. “You’re soaked. Have you been down in the woods already?”

No. Not-No.

He was still figuring out what to say when he heard the back porch door open and whack shut. It was all the provocation the pup needed to leap up and shake the lead in its mouth as if it were a serpent. Edgar’s mother deftly settled it and circled its muzzle with her thumb and forefinger to stop its nipping. “These guys are stir-crazy,” she said. “Thank God the rain stopped. Hurry up and get changed. I’m going to need help this morning.” She kept her attention on the pup as she spoke, waiting for it to break again. Edgar couldn’t tell if she was avoiding his gaze and he waited. When she looked over he saw she was avoiding nothing.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He could have told her then about what he’d seen that night past, but it was as though she knelt in some place visible to him but unreachable by words. He thought if only he waited she might notice the difference in him. Maybe in the world itself. Outside, there was the thud of the Impala’s door closing. The starter turned over and the engine roughly idled. He knelt there and looked at the doorway. The hammer’s claw bit into his hip. He knew there was still time to walk to the Impala, drag open the door, bring the steel head of the hammer crashing around, but a kind of dislocation passed through him, as though some alternate Edgar had split away to pursue that different future. Then the Impala was rolling along the driveway. On the road it throated up and topped the hill.

He looked up. His mother was still watching him but he didn’t answer her. He turned back to the workshop and replaced the hammer and walked to the house. After he’d changed clothes he came downstairs to the living room and looked at the blanket and pillow lying crumpled on the couch. Claude had not been on the couch when Edgar walked through the house the night before and the gesture at pretense left him feeling hollowed out. He sat with a hand in Almondine’s ruff and stared at the couch. Finally he stood and walked out the door.

What happened next was impossible, yet it happened anyway: an ordinary morning passed. But ordinary was the very thing Edgar was least prepared for. As soon as he walked out the door, his mother asked him to begin fetching the dogs from the kennel in pairs and triples, youngest first. By the time the sun was halfway to its zenith the ordinariness of the day encroached from every direction, the concrete, tangible, undeniable world insisting that the preceding night had not happened. Those memories that had poured through him, indelible at sunrise, began to fade until all that remained was the finest scrim in his mind. It could have been any warm summer morning except for the fact that whenever Edgar closed his eyes a gloss raindrop hung in the darkness before him, the yard lights captured and inverted within. By noon he felt he was coming apart. What he felt was confusion, though it seemed more complicated than that. When his mother headed in for lunch he said he wasn’t hungry and led the last two dogs to the barn and kenneled them and put his head against the pen door and listened as they lapped their water. He found work gloves and scooped up the rubble in the workshop and poured it into the milk can and dragged the can back where it belonged.

When he was done he climbed the mow steps. Almondine stood waiting for him in the midday twilight of pinholes and cracks. He sank onto a pair of straw bales and drew his knees to his chest. Before he could reach out to her, sleep engulfed him. She stood beside his curled body and set a nostril to the finger he’d cut the night before. After a time she circled and downed and lay watching him.

IN HIS DREAM, Edgar sat atop the mow stairs, looking into the workshop. He knew that wasn’t possible-the rough timbered wall of the stairwell should have blocked his view-but his sleep had a lucidity that rendered the wall as transparent as glass. Below, his father stood at the workbench, back turned. Edgar could see the black, tousled hair on the top of his head and the temples of his glasses hooked behind his ears. The top of the workbench was covered with leatherworking tools and a tin can of grommets, and his father held a leash whose clasp end had frayed. When Edgar glanced at the file cabinets, his father stood there too, walking his fingers across the overstuffed manila folders of an open drawer and lifting one out and splaying it open. Both of them worked silently, each engrossed and oblivious to the other.

A tendril of white smoke advanced between the ceiling beams. No flames in sight, no fire to extinguish. Edgar descended the stairs and stood in the workshop. The smoke thickened into a gray haze. He inhaled a wisp of it and coughed, but his father, both his fathers, carried on, unaware. Somehow Edgar had grown impossibly tall, his head almost brushing the ceiling beams. He had the power to be ordinary-sized, he knew, but then the figures of his father would vanish and he would be alone in the workshop.

He found the hay hatch by feel alone, running his hands along the ceiling until he could trace the outline. When he pressed upward a ponderous weight resisted-Edgar himself, asleep on the bales. He shifted both hands to one edge of the hatch and pushed again, straining. A crack appeared. Streamers of smoke shot through, sucked into the space above, but the weight of the hatch was too much and he had to set it back. Then a new plume of smoke appeared, dense and black and tasting like hot metal.

The next instant, the ceiling was out of reach and he was alone in the workshop. It was night. Light from the gooseneck lamp over the front doors penetrated the small workshop window, casting a skewed yellow rectangle against the wall. Almondine appeared, leading Claude. A hesitant expression played over Claude’s face, but Almondine nosed him forward. He passed Edgar and took up the frayed lead. His hands worked the leather and soon the lead was repaired. Claude nodded and stroked Almondine’s back. Then Edgar walked to Almondine’s side and he, too, began to draw his hands along her flanks.

THEY COOKED DINNER THAT night standing side by side, Edgar frying sliced potatoes while his mother turned a pair of pork chops in a skillet, reaching over occasionally to add a dab of fat to his potatoes, like an old married couple thinking about the day while the grease spat. She set out silverware and plates and bread and butter and halved a grapefruit and sprinkled some sugar on top and put the halves face up in bowls.

They sat to eat. He pushed his spoon into the skin between the grapefruit sections and looked out the window at a world gone blue. Blue sky, blue earth, blue trees with blue leaves, as if visible through miles of clear water.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, finally.

He wanted desperately to talk about what had happened the night before but old feelings rushed forward from those first few weeks after the funeral when he’d dreamed about his father: speak and you’ll forget it all even as the words come out. You won’t remember long enough to finish. And he thought, too, about his father signing, They won’t believe you.

Do you think there is a heaven or hell? he signed.

“I don’t know. Not in the Christian way, if that’s what you mean. I think people have a right to believe in whatever they want. I just don’t.”

I don’t mean like the Bible. I mean, do you think anything at all happens to a person after they die?

She spooned up a section of grapefruit. “I guess I don’t think about those things as much as I should. It’s hard to believe it matters when there’s the same work to do either way. Lots of people think it’s an important question, though, and if they think so, then it is for them. But they have to answer it for themselves.”