Opening
These chapters pivot the novel from wandering exile to a homebound reckoning. As Edgar Sawtelle returns at dusk, love and loyalty exact their cost: Almondine makes her final, faithful choice, and secrets Claude thought buried begin to surface. The farm becomes a stage for grief, manipulation, and the first moves of a coming confrontation.
What Happens
Chapter 36: Almondine
From Almondine’s perspective, time frays. Old age and grief blur memory and present as she drifts through scenes of Edgar as a boy, then snaps back to the empty farm that seems to have forgotten him. Her body falters, but her purpose sharpens: find her boy. The world that once anchors her now feels estranged, as if only she remembers what matters—a raw portrait of The Human-Animal Bond told from the animal’s mind.
Convinced she has missed the one place Edgar must be, Almondine leaves the farm. She steps onto the gravel road, facing the “travelers” who might carry news of him. As a truck bears down, she stands still and asks her silent question—if it has seen her boy—offering her life for an answer. The chapter’s final image implies the truck hits her, sealing a death that embodies Grief and Loss and the extremity of devotion.
Chapter 37: Edgar
Part V, “Poison,” opens with Edgar’s return at sunset, Essay at his side and his heart split between “longing and dread.” The farm stands deserted. He moves through the house and barn like a ghost, unsettled most by Almondine’s absence—she would have found him already. In the kitchen, he leaves a note for his mother, Trudy Sawtelle, promising to return tomorrow. Beside it, he sets the incriminating photograph of Claude Sawtelle and Forte—a wordless challenge.
Hidden in the fields, he watches Trudy and Claude arrive. No Almondine. A dread certainty rises. At the birch stand where family lies buried, he finds a fresh, unmarked grave beside his father’s. The sight collapses him into grief. A memory surges—Almondine once placing herself between him and a rabid animal—an image of self-sacrifice that now completes his solitude and marks his Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence. Knowing Trudy would have come if she’d seen his note, he understands Claude has intercepted it. Edgar watches as Claude slips into the barn alone in the night.
Chapter 38: Trudy
Sleepless, Trudy replays the dogs’ agitation when she and Claude returned, the moment that sent Claude outside. She thinks of the secret she keeps from him: the plan with Edgar—signal from behind the silo when it’s safe. The nights she failed to stand there weigh on her.
A long memory opens. After her last miscarriage, a “black place” swallowed her days, until Gar Sawtelle brought home a dying feral pup, Almondine’s mother. Caring for it drew her back, even though it died. When Gar himself died, the same darkness returned. Claude’s arrival became a tether. It began with a need to hear stories of Gar—Claude’s versions, untidy and alive—then became physical, a way to keep the black place at bay. She contrasts Gar’s quiet order with Claude’s music and chaos, and admits how his noise shields her from pain. The chapter maps how love, grief, and need entwine—complicating Family and Legacy and entangling her in Truth and Deception.
Chapter 39: Edgar
Edgar’s mourning hardens into purpose. He remembers Ida Paine’s warning about “what’s in the juice” and the specific bottle he must find. A childhood memory surfaces: a loose board in the barn’s mow, a small cache that once held only a bottle cap. He slips into the barn, calms the restless dogs, and pries up the board.
The hiding place is there—but crudely enlarged. The cap is gone. Someone has been here. The gouged wood reads like Claude’s signature. Any hope of discovering a second cache feels foolish. Edgar pens Essay safely with her littermates, then burrows into the hayloft, turning the barn into a blind where he can listen, think, and wait for morning.
Chapter 40: Glen Papineau
The focus shifts to Glen Papineau, whose grief has curdled into fixation on his father’s death and Edgar’s supposed guilt. He nurses a persistent fantasy: he finds Edgar, seats him in the patrol car, and hears the confession he craves. He shares this obsession with Claude, who feeds it and proposes a plan to subdue Edgar with antifreeze.
When Claude calls to say Edgar has left a note and lurks somewhere on the property, Glen acts. He raids his father’s old clinic for medical-grade ether—stronger than Prestone—then prowls the farm and woods. The night defeats him. He drives empty roads and replays his fantasy to the air. The chapter exposes how Claude warps grief into a weapon, turning an officer of the law into a pawn.
Character Development
These chapters strip away comforts and rationalizations, pushing each character toward choices that define them.
- Edgar Sawtelle: Moves from stunned grief to deliberate inquiry. Almondine’s loss ends his last refuge and steels him to expose Claude and avenge Gar.
- Trudy Sawtelle: Gains psychological depth. Her affair with Claude grows from a survival response to grief, not simple betrayal, complicating blame and sympathy.
- Claude Sawtelle: Emerges as a calculating manipulator—intercepting messages, erasing evidence, and recruiting Glen to do his dirty work.
- Glen Papineau: Slides from grieving son to compromised enforcer, imagining confession before seeking truth.
- Almondine: Enacts ultimate loyalty. Her death both completes Edgar’s isolation and sanctifies their bond as the story’s moral center.
Themes & Symbols
Grief and Loss saturate every thread—Almondine’s final act, Edgar’s resolve, Trudy’s need for Claude, Glen’s obsession. Loss here doesn’t only wound; it redirects lives, bending love into compulsion or purpose. Betrayal and Revenge surface as Edgar returns not to flee but to prove what Claude did; Claude betrays kin and community by corrupting a lawman. Truth and Deception spar in the dark: a note intercepted, a bottle hidden then removed, signals kept secret, and a farm full of people acting on partial knowledge.
Symbols concentrate meaning. The hiding place in the mow—once a child’s stash—becomes the family’s buried archive, then a scarred cavity that records tampering and the attempt to erase the past. Trudy’s “black place” names depression as a physical terrain, a gravitational pull that explains choices without excusing harm. And Almondine at the road’s edge turns the highway into an oracle: a place where love asks an impossible question and pays for the answer.
Key Quotes
“if it had seen her boy. Her essence. Her soul.”
Almondine’s silent plea collapses boy, essence, and soul into one. Her worldview is relational; Edgar is not separate from her identity. Standing before the truck, she treats the road as witness and judge, making her death an act of testimony.
“longing and dread”
Edgar returns split between desire for home and fear of what it contains. The phrase frames the farm as both sanctuary and crime scene, preparing the shift from wilderness survival to moral investigation.
“what’s in the juice”
Ida Paine’s line refracts literal poison into a thesis for the section: substances that kill, stories that corrupt, and influences—Claude’s most of all—that seep into people and institutions.
“I’m sorry.”
In Glen’s fantasy, Edgar’s imagined apology doubles as confession and absolution. It reveals Glen’s need not for facts but for a narrative that resolves his pain, making him especially vulnerable to Claude’s manipulation.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This stretch reorients the novel toward its tragic endgame. Almondine’s death removes Edgar’s last shield and turns the farm into hostile terrain. Trudy’s memories and needs complicate the moral map, showing how grief binds her to Claude even as it blinds her. Claude’s tampering with the mow cache and his orchestration of Glen confirm that the threat is not only intimate but systemic. With Edgar hidden in the barn, Claude alerted, and law warped into a tool, the final confrontation becomes inevitable—and personal stakes fuse with the question of whether truth can surface in a landscape saturated with deception.