in Ashland but it was snowing so hard his mother thought they wouldn’t be able to get back. They stayed home and watched the astronauts driving around on the moon in their buggy. His father said it looked like they were getting ready to plant corn. And every week there was a news story about Alexandra Honeywell and Starchild Colony. It was cold; people were leaving, she admitted, but the inspired would take their place. She stood in the snow reading poetry to the camera and talked about the voyageurs. Often, those segments played after the weather report. He never failed to be in the living room when the forecast was announced.
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE his mother roasted a duck. Near midnight, they poured three glasses of champagne and clinked. The television counted down to midnight and when Auld Lang Syne began to play, his mother jumped up and held out her hand and asked him to dance.
I don’t know how, he signed.
“Then it’s time you learned,” she said, pulling him up off the couch. Though they were staying home, she wore a black-and-white dress and black shoes with straps across the back, and nylons. She showed him how to put his arm around her waist and hold out his other hand and she put her hand in his.
“This is how the girls will look at you when you dance with them,” she said, and she looked into his eyes until he blushed. He didn’t know how to move his feet. He couldn’t even explain the problem since she was holding his hands, but she knew anyway.
“Here, like a box,” she said. She stopped and made him put his hands out, palm down, and she moved them to demonstrate what his feet should do. Then she stepped up to him again. The room was dark, and the lights from the Christmas tree sparkled in the windows. When she put her head against his shoulder, the air grew warm. The sweet cider taste of the champagne was in his mouth, mingled with his mother’s perfume, and he knew even then that the sensation would be with him for the rest of his life.
When the song stopped, his mother whispered, “Happy new year.” His father had been leaning against the kitchen doorway. When the orchestra started in again, he walked up and said, “Pardon me, may I cut in?” His mother slipped away from Edgar and into his father’s arms. Edgar watched them dance, music ringing through the house, and then he opened the refrigerator and took a package of curds and pulled on his shoes and coat. He tried to tell them where he was going. Though the song had ended, they stood there, swaying, silhouetted against the lights of the Christmas tree.
He and Almondine ran through a night black and sharp-edged with cold. In the barn, he switched on the lights and set Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz” on the old record player. Then he used up the curds, handing them out to the dogs, even the puppies, and signing to each in turn a happy new year.
JANUARY THAW. THE ASH they spread along the driveway melted the snow into gray puddles, candied with ice in the morning. He sat in their living room wearing a coat and boots, watching for the yellow caterpillar of the school bus through the bare trees. In the afternoons, the sun was up barely long enough to take his litter into the yard before suppertime to proof them on come-fors and stays in the snow. They learned quickly now. He led three of them at a time to the birches in the south field, then ran to the yard and released them with a sweeping gesture they could see against the sky, and they sliced across the field like a trio of wolves, bodies stretched over the white snowdrifts.
He was getting better, too. With a single dog, he could make leash corrections as well as his mother, catching them in the middle of their first step out of a stay, when they had barely made up their mind to break; when he did it right, they settled back before lifting their hindquarters all the way off the ground. But he didn’t make it look easy like she did. It took every bit of his concentration. He learned to toss a collar chain at their hindquarters if they didn’t come on the long-line recalls, though his accuracy was a problem. Plus, he moved his arm so much they saw it coming. He practiced against a bale of straw. His mother could flick her wrist and catch a dog loafing halfway across the mow. When he wasn’t expecting it, she threw one against his own backside. The shock of it, the jingle and the impact, made him jump.
“Like that,” she said, smiling. “Works pretty well, doesn’t it?”
And all the while his dogs grew smarter—caught on to the corrections and found ways to beat them. They would be seven months old soon, and their coats were sleek and winter-thickened. They’d grown as tall as they were going to get, but his father said their chests wouldn’t fill out until the summer.
Doctor Papineau, when he visited, could never keep them straight, but to Edgar they were so different it was hard to believe they came from the same litter. He could tell them apart by their movements alone, the sound of their footfalls. Essay always pushed to see what she could get away with, waiting until he looked away to bolt. Tinder, the most rambunctious, would break a stay just because one of his littermates looked at him with a certain glint in his eye. Baboo was the opposite: once in a stay, he would sit forever. He made up for his delay coming off the long line with his love of retrieves. He trotted back to Edgar again and again with the target in his mouth, an aw-shucks swagger rocking his hindquarters.
They were, each of them, brilliant, frustrating, stubborn, petulant. And Edgar could watch them move—just move—all day.
ICY GRAINS, DRY AND WHITE, were falling from low, flannelled clouds. The wind gathered and swept the grains across the yard like a surf. When Edgar opened the barn door, a tendril of snow scorpioned along the cement floor and dispersed at Almondine’s feet. His father was kneeling in the farthest whelping pen, where a pup squirmed and mewled on the silver pan of the scale, its ears folded and otterlike. As Edgar watched, his father cradled the pup in his hands and set it back with its mother.
“Giants,” he said, writing a note on the log sheet. “And ornery. They haven’t opened their eyes yet and they’re already pushing each other around. You should be grateful you didn’t end up with this batch.”
I’m taking mine upstairs, Edgar signed.
His father nodded and turned back to the pup. “I want to clean out those buckets in the workshop before your mother gets back from town. When you finish, find me, okay?”
Okay, he signed. He knew which buckets his father meant—a whole row of them under the workshop stairs, all different sizes, some not buckets at all but battered old lidless ten-gallon milk cans filled to the brim with scrap metal, old nails, hinges, screws, bolts. His father had been threatening to either sort through them or pitch them into the silo for as long as he could remember.
Edgar pulled Finch and Essay out of their runs to practice long-distance downs. The dogs bounded to the workshop and up the stairs, tussling and growling in the straw as he and Almondine followed. In the mow, he could see his breath in the air. He closed the vestibule door. Almondine, without immediate training duties, found a comfortable corner to watch from. Edgar stayed one dog and let it rest while he snapped a long line to the other’s collar and put it in a standing stay. On each trial, he lifted his hand overhead to signal a down, rewarding them with a scrub of their ruff, or correcting with a sharp tug on the long line, which he’d threaded through an eye bolt in the floor to direct the force down and not forward. As soon as they’d mastered one distance, he retreated a pace farther.
Essay understood the exercise at once, and how to confound it. She waited until Edgar was walking toward her—when it was hardest to give a correction—then stood up before she was released, panting merrily. Or she would lie down but immediately roll over. Twice, while she was supposed to be waiting her turn, he discovered her poking at the bales of straw, contemplating a climb. Finch, on the other hand, never took his eyes off Edgar. The problem was he just kept standing there, watching, when Edgar signed the down. After Edgar had repeated the command three times, Finch began to look concerned. Edgar scolded himself for repeating commands and walked
