The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

It is spring, and Trudy and Edgar focus on the kennel. Without his father, Edgar, though just 14, shoulders more and more responsibilities. He rejects his mother’s suggestion that when he completes high school, they sell the kennel to help pay for his college. Edgar assures her of his commitment to the family business.

The farm is becoming important to Edgar. In sorting through his father’s papers in the barn, Edgar comes across letters and newspaper articles, some dated more than 40 years earlier, about efforts his grandfather made to genetically engineer a new breed of dog. The idea was controversial. Edgar finds correspondences with Albert Brooks, a New Jersey dog breeder working for a prestigious canine journal, who dismissed such an endeavor as “breathtakingly naïve” (172). Brooks assures Edgar’s grandfather that people can only “create better dogs” when they become “better people” (177). For Edgar, the letters are a revelation, and he feels committed to training and breeding better dogs. Clearly his grandfather was a dreamer, at once stubborn and quixotic. 

In the weeks after his father’s death, Edgar dreams frequently of his father; often he feels his father is trying to speak to him. To help with the farm expenses, Trudy returns to teaching and rejects out of hand Dr. Papineau’s suggestion that she invite Claude to help. Papineau is impressed by how the mother and son are keeping up the operations, although he is concerned about whether they can keep up the pace.

Almondine is troubled after Gar’s death by the lingering scent of the man she loved. She remembers the man’s long strides, quiet ways, and gentleness. By spring, however, the scent begins to fade. Nevertheless, sometimes Almondine still sleeps next to Gar’s favorite chair for an entire day.

By late spring, after weeks of overworking and neglecting a bad cough, Trudy comes down with pneumonia. She must be quarantined. Running the farm now falls entirely to Edgar. He tries to rise to the challenge. Five days later, despite Edgar’s best efforts to maintain the routine of the kennels, he neglects to feed the dogs, and a fight breaks out between two of them. Edgar tries to force the two angry dogs apart. In the ensuing melee, one of the dogs bites Edgar on his forearm. Disturbed by the noise of the fracas, Trudy comes into the kennel. She is concerned over Edgar’s bloody forearm. Edgar signs to his mother that she needs to call Claude. The kennel is too much for him. 

Claude arrives the very next day. With Edgar’s help, Claude tends to the wounds on both dogs. Edgar watches as his uncle soothes the dogs until he can get them sedated using a syringe. Claude then tends to the wounds before suturing them up “neat, black, and even” (220). Edgar admires his uncle’s confident way with the syringe.

Edgar grows accustomed to Claude’s Impala parked at the farm. Ever alert and observant, Edgar senses that Claude is pursuing a romantic relationship with his mother. Determined to keep his mother faithful to the memory of his father, Edgar asks her about the miscarriages before he was born, and whether the grief she feels now for Gar is like that. Trudy struggles to answer. She reveals that she knows he is sleeping restlessly since Claude returned, that he even hits himself in the chest while he sleeps. She tells him Claude proposed marriage, but that she declined for now. Trudy tells Edgar that he reminds her of his father—the way Edgar walks and the way he works with the dogs. But, she tells him, things change: “There’s a difference between missing [your father] and wanting nothing to change” (228).

One rainy night, when the dogs out in the kennel bay mournfully for no apparent reason, Edgar decides to investigate.

As Edgar approaches the barn through the pouring rain, he discerns a shadowy figure of a man. Edgar is stunned when the figure begins to sign to him, telling him to release the dogs. Released, the dogs happily gather about the ghostly figure. The figure reveals to Edgar that he is his father, and that tonight Edgar must search the barn for something “he” thinks is “lost forever” (238). Gar does not identify who the “he” is, but Edgar understands his father means Claude. Inside the barn, Edgar rummages through the stacks of materials, uncertain what he is looking for. Under the stairs, the boy discovers a plastic-barreled syringe. He returns to his father and shows him the syringe. Gar reminds Edgar that he has seen his uncle use a syringe. The father warns Edgar that his brother has always taken what he wants, and that if what he wants is Trudy, he will have her. Before the figure vanishes in the rainy mist, it drops the syringe into the grass. It cracks, spilling whatever was in it. 

The following morning, Edgar awakens troubled by the night before. He wonders whether it was a dream, or if he really saw a ghost. Claude and Trudy are having breakfast. He sees his uncle now in a dangerous light. Edgar thinks his uncle regards him differently. Determined to appear normal, Edgar greets his uncle with a smile.

Trudy senses that something troubles Edgar. She tells him that if he has a problem with his uncle, he should know that Claude will be moving back to his old room. Trudy assures her son that, although his father and his uncle had moments of anger, such fights “had been going on all their lives” (257). Edgar believes that the coroner’s findings about the aneurysm were wrong, that his uncle killed his father, and that somehow that syringe was key. He is stunned to see that the grass has turned white “as bone” (261) on the spot where the syringe was crushed in the rain.

That night, Edgar wrestles with the mysterious message his father tried to convey to him before he vanished. Gar had started to sign the letters H A A I. In the barn, Edgar rummages through the archives of the farm’s paperwork looking for clues. He comes across a letter, dated 1935, to his grandfather telling him that a dog named Hachiko died in Japan. The letter, and others that Edgar unearths, suggest that Hachiko was the product of his father’s early cutting-edge efforts to breed a super dog, a canine able to discern emotions and respond to situations with logic. Edgar, though fascinated, is not sure why his father wanted him to find out about this dog.