I first read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle ten (or so) years ago. I saw it on Oprah's best book list, and I bought it because I love dogs and was intrigued with the story line, which centered around a young deaf boy who runs away from home with three dogs he raised (from a fictitious breed of dogs his family owns). It was a first book for the author David Wroblewski, and I loved his insight into a dog's psyche and the beautiful language he employed.
This passage reflects Wroblewski's clever insight when Almondine (now Edgar's dog) mourns the death of his father, her beloved master.
To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.
He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.
Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.
And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.
Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him.
As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.
And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.”
I still choke up when I read that passage and I remember the sweet pets I've had. Wroblewski's sensitive writing seems to capture exactly what a loyal pet might think/feel at the loss of a master. You all know Katie, my golden retriever I lost several years ago. She's still all around my classroom and even on the blog. She is, in fact, my display name still; I never had the heart to change it. She had an amazing bond with all my family.
Book critics compared the plot of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle to Shakespeare's Hamlet - a jealous man who murders his brother and sleeps with his wife, complete with ghosts and intrigue. It was Wroblewski's language, though, and obvious love for dogs that kept me glued to his book, unable to put it down.
In giving you the "memorable passage" assignment, though, and thinking about this book, I realize I must read it again. I hope you find a good read, too.
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