AFTER DINNER ONE EVENING Claude maneuvered Doctor Papineau out to the kennel, unaware, it seemed, that Edgar was there. When he heard them coming, he stepped into the dark outside the rear barn doors and listened. The two men walked into the whelping room, then came out and stood looking into the night.
“Maybe it is time,” Doctor Papineau was saying. “I’ve maintained these dogs are a too-well-kept secret for years now.”
“Well, you know what I think,” Claude said, “but Trudy might appreciate your advice. She respects your opinion something fierce.”
“I don’t know about that. With Trudy, it’s better to wait to be asked than to offer an opinion.”
In the dark, Edgar grinned. He wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but he remembered well the night Doctor Papineau had provoked his mother and how quickly the old man had backpedaled.
“We’d want to rethink your share if you came in on this. Twenty percent might be more reasonable.”
Doctor Papineau grunted, a low hmmm-hmmm-hmm. “I never have gotten around to selling that lot on Lake Namekegon. It’s just sitting there,” he said. “How many does he want to start with?”
“Twelve, for now. A pilot run at Christmas, and then something bigger next year.”
“I suppose I could talk to Trudy next time I’m out.”
They were quiet for a time.
“You know, Stumpy’s is having a fish boil on Saturday. First of the summer.”
“Is that right. Lake trout?”
They turned and walked up the kennel aisle.
“Whitefish, I think. Why don’t we swing by and pick you up? I could make myself scarce if you wanted to talk to Trudy then.”
Edgar watched them go. After Doctor Papineau had driven away, he walked into the house and clapped his leg to call Almondine to go upstairs, all the while feeling Claude’s gaze on his back.
WHEN SATURDAY NIGHT CAME, Edgar made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere with Claude. His mother feigned indifference, as with a contrary pup, though he knew she felt otherwise. The moment the Impala’s taillights disappeared, he rifled the mail drawer, then the kennel files laid on top of the freezer, and the working notebooks. Almondine sat and watched him search. In the closet, he checked the pockets of Claude’s coat and trousers. He found nothing to help make sense of that overheard conversation.
Then he turned to more unlikely places-the ammo box with the old telegram, the truck, and finally the spare room. It was almost empty, and had been since Claude moved out, but on the interior wall was a small door. He crouched and opened it and looked into the unfinished rafter space above the kitchen. There, stacked haphazardly across the dusty batts of pink insulation, were a dozen cardboard boxes, the ones his mother had packed that winter day he’d come upon her with her hair wild about her head and so lost in grief she had not even seen him. He knelt on the joists and pulled the boxes into the room. They were printed with logos for canned tomatoes, baked beans, ketchup, their flaps crossed and taped down. The heaviest were jammed with shirts and trousers exuding the faint scent of his father’s aftershave. Edgar ran his hands along the insides, feeling for anything not fabric. Two of the boxes held coats and hats, and two more, shoes. Finally, a smaller box of miscellany: his father’s spring-banded wristwatch, his razor, his key ring, his empty leather billfold, shiny on the flanks but the corners stretched and pale and the stitching unraveling on one side.
From the bottom Edgar lifted out a Mellen High School yearbook, class of 1948. Tucked inside the front cover was his father’s diploma, printed on thick stock with “Mellen High School” crested across the top. He paged through the black-and-white photographs until he found his father among the twenty-five graduates, between Donald Rogers and Marjory Schneider. His father’s expression was severe in the style of many of the portraits and his gaze focused on some distant concern. He’d worn glasses even then. Edgar turned to the sophomores. Claude was listed as one of three without a picture.
Edgar scrutinized the posed group shots and candids-the football team, the farm club, the choral group, the crowd in the cafeteria. In the process, two loose photographs slipped from the latter pages. People and places he did not recognize. He shook the yearbook over his lap. Three more photographs fluttered out. In one, his father stood on a lakeshore, fishing. In the other, he sat in a truck, sporting several days’ growth of beard. His elbow rested on the open window and his hand was draped over the steering wheel.
The final photograph had been taken in their yard. In it, the barn appeared in the distance, rising darkly above the slope of the side lawn. His father was looking on from near the milk house, a tiny figure. In the foreground stood Claude, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. A massive, full-grown dog had just leapt into his outstretched arms. He was laughing and staggering backward. And one of his eyes was black.
Edgar sat looking at the photograph. The dog, in motion when the shutter was tripped, appeared mostly as a blur, but it was very big, that much was obvious. It didn’t look like one of their dogs, not exactly, a mix of some kind, though predominantly shepherd, with a dark face, high-set ears, and a saber tail. Edgar turned the photograph over. On the back, in his father’s draftsman-like handwriting, a caption read: Claude and Forte, July 1948.
CLAUDE HAD TAKEN ON the kennel paperwork, an idea Edgar’s mother welcomed. Edgar found Claude at the kitchen table often, letters spread about, talking on the telephone for follow-ups and new placements. If Edgar walked in during one of his conversations, Claude would cut his conversation short, as if his brother’s work was hard enough without his being under observation as well. The files and records themselves were neatly organized and legible; the problem was mastering the lineage of the dogs available for breeding the next litter and holding all the requisite information in his head. Claude knew the basics, of course. John Sawtelle had drilled the principles of animal husbandry into both his sons. But Claude had been away from the kennel long enough that the complex scoring system, refined by Edgar’s father over the years, was now a mystery to him.
On the other hand, Claude’s attitude toward any accomplishment was cool indifference, a studious lack of awe. No matter what the feat, whether a pyrotechnic piano solo on a variety show or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sinking a last-minute skyhook for the Bucks, Claude was unimpressed. He often declared that a person could get anything he wanted if he was willing to go slow enough. The pianist, he would point out, had sacrificed his childhood practicing-of course he could tickle the ivories. Jabbar was born tall and he worked at the game five days a week, all year round.
“Everyone gets good at their job,” he said. “It’s osmosis. The most ordinary thing in the world.”
Edgar’s mother laughed when Claude started in, having decided it was a form of backhanded compliment, since the more impressive the feat, the more steadfastly Claude held to his position. It wasn’t disrespectful, he maintained, because the principle applied to everyone, straight across the board: Trudy, Edgar, and most especially Claude himself. It was never a question of whether Claude could learn to do something, just a question of whether it would be worthwhile and how long it would take. This was his approach to mastering the kennel records (and learning to read sign, for that matter, despite the fact that he walked past the sign dictionary in the living room every day). If he kept his hands in the files long enough, the scoring system would become clear and the merits and flaws of the various lines would sink in without effort. During telephone conversations he idly flipped through whatever folder happened to be in front of him, doodling lineage charts on the newspaper.