The Silent Boy

She flounced herself down in a kitchen chair. "It's not even a farmer's hat. The man had on a straw farmer's hat, but the boy had on that hot old thing. Is he stupid or something?"



She angered me. I didn't want her to be thinking about Jacob, to be asking questions, to be raising doubts. "I don't know," I said curtly. "Look, here's a magazine we can look at." I picked up a ladies' magazine from the cushioned seat of a rocker in the corner and set it in front of Jessie at the table.



Later, though, when we were at home, and alone together, sitting in the parlor after supper while Mother put Mary to bed, I asked Father the same thing. "Why do you think Jacob Stoltz wears that wool cap all the time? Once I saw him take it off at his house, but only because his father forced him."



But Father had no answer. "We all have habits," he said. "Your mother tells me I pull at my ear."



"You do," I told him, "when you're thinking. And Mother chews her lip when she's worried."



"And I recall, Katydid, that when you were very small, you had a pink blanket that you carried everywhere."



"I did? Why don't I remember that?"



"You gave it up. It was a baby habit, and you grew to be a girl. But a boy like Jacob—"



"You're pulling your ear, Father."



We both laughed. "Well," he said, "it shows that I'm thinking."



"What about a boy like Jacob?"



"His hat gives him some kind of feeling that he needs to have, is my guess. But since he doesn't talk, we can't ask him what that feeling is. I say he feels a need to hide himself, in a way."



I thought about it, trying to imagine myself with a heavy hat pulled over my hair. "Protect," I said.



"What?"



"A need to protect himself. I think that's what his feeling is."



Father pulled his ear again, then realized it, chuckled, stopped, and grew serious again."I think you're right, Katy. He protects himself."



"But from what? A hat can't keep you from danger."



"No," Father agreed. "No, it can't. Not physical danger. A falling tree branch would go right through that cap, and Jacob would have himself a fine fractured skull, same as you or me.



"But I think Jacob has his own world inside his head, Katy. I think his cap keeps that world feeling safe."



13. AUGUST 1911



It was August. Hot, still. Mother and I were sitting together on the front porch late on a Tuesday afternoon. Upstairs, Mary was napping; she had been fretful, and we thought she was cutting teeth. Peggy was in the backyard taking the washing from the line. Through the screen door we could hear Naomi in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and through the open window to the parlor, the muffled slap-slap of Gram at her card game.



I was just beginning to read A Girl of the Limberlost aloud to Mother as she did some needlework. She was embroidering a collar to replace one that had faded, on her blue linen dress.



I would be nine in two months.



I looked up at the end of the first chapter. "I can't understand how mean Elnora's mother is," I said. "She doesn't even mind when her own daughter is humiliated in school!"



My own mother smiled. "If she were a perfect mother, the book wouldn't be so interesting," she pointed out.



I thought it over and nodded, because she was right, and I went on to the next chapter.



A late-day breeze lifted the vines growing along the side of the porch. The moonflowers and morning glories shaded the porch, and all summer we had flowers at the beginning and end of the day. The entire neighborhood was shaded by tall elms. Across the street, Mrs. Stevenson was watering the late-blooming rosebushes in her side yard, moving carefully from one to the next, tilting the large spouted can.



Next door, the shades were drawn on the windows of the Bishops house. Often we drew the shades down to keep the house cool. But the house next door, where Austin lived, had an uncomfortable, inhospitable silence to it. There had been trouble there.



"How quiet it is. The sound of my pages turning is the only sound," I said to Mother.



But she shook her head and said, "Listen!" And of course then I could hear birds.



"A robin," she said, "with that wonderful throaty song."



"Like gargling," I told her, and we both made a face. Father always makes us gargle with hot salt water for sore throats.



"They'll fly south next month," Mother said. "I always wonder how they—



"Shhh!" she said suddenly. She put down her embroidery hoop and lifted a finger. "What's that?"



We both listened intently. The robin had fallen silent, interrupted by another noise, which seemed to come from the south, toward town, beyond the Methodist church at the corner of the next block. It was a rapid staccato sound, abrupt and ugly, as if some large machinery were starting, stopping, and laboring mightily in between.



Several young boys appeared, running down the middle of the street toward our house, laughing and calling as they looked back. I recognized the Cooper brothers from the next block.



"Here he comes!" one of them called to us. By now several neighbors had come to their porches, and across the street, Mrs. Stevenson had put down her watering can and was watching. From our kitchen, Naomi appeared at the screen door, wiping her hands on her apron, with Gram beside her. Through the open bedroom window I heard Mary stir and whimper upstairs.



The noise had become downright deafening, and then we saw him: Mr. Bishop, Austin's father, grinning with pride, behind the steering mechanism of an automobile as he jounced and sputtered past our house, coming finally to a stop just in front of his own. The machine gave a sort of wheeze, and there was a smoky smell about it. The Cooper brothers had come close and were eyeing it with excitement, curiosity, and fear. From the next block their mother approached, holding a wooden spoon in her hand—she must have been preparing supper. Walking rapidly down from the corner, she called to her boys. "Stand back!" she cried out in alarm. "It might explode!"



Mr. Bishop was wearing goggles. He removed them with a flourish and leapt from the seat of the thing. "You're in no danger," he reassured the Cooper brothers, who hadn't moved an inch, despite their mother's shouted warning. "I'll take the two of you for a spin," he added, and their eyes went wide in delight.



"But first, my wife," he announced. Mrs. Bishop, with Laura Paisley on her hip, had appeared on their porch and was looking with horror at the thing. "Louise?" he called to her proudly. "I have some goggles for you, and a duster!" He held up a garment that was folded beside him on the seat.



"Paul," she called back, "you have taken leave of your senses!"



"Me, Father! Take me!" Austin had come from the house now, and down the steps, and was eagerly examining the machine. In a minute Austin was perched beside his father and they were sputtering noisily down the street, while the Cooper boys, wild with envy on the brick sidewalk, looked on. My father, summoned by the commotion, had come from his office with several patients right behind him, and they all stood on the sidewalk, watching.



"Isn't that something!" Father said in an admiring voice. Mrs. Cooper, still holding her spoon, commiserated with Mrs. Bishop and my mother about the extravagant foolishness of men.



The Bishops were the first family in town to own a motorcar, and it cost nine hundred dollars: enough, Peggy said to me as she spooned oatmeal into Mary that evening, to feed a family of orphans for a year.



"I am not at all sure that there can be such a thing as a family of orphans," I told her. "Doesn't a family mean a father and a mother, as well as children? So if the children are orphans, then—"



Peggy frowned at me and I knew enough to change the subject. Peggy didn't frown often, but her frown was fierce.



"Mr. Bishop says Father should get one. He said it would be an amazing help in case of medical emergencies," I told her. "You know how long it takes for the boy to harness the horses and bring them around. But if he had a Ford automobile, he could simply telephone the garage, and—"



Mary put her hand, suddenly, into the dish of oatmeal and from there into her hair. Peggy sighed and went to the sink to dampen a cloth.



The hall clock struck six. Mother was setting the table for supper. Naomi had made us chicken and corn soup, and there was lovely-smelling fresh-baked bread.



"Katy," Mother said, "go and see if your father will be finished soon." So I scampered away to find him and made the suggestion again as I watched him tidy his office. "So you see, Father, you would simply telephone the garage, and—"



"—and the man at the garage would say, 'I'm so sorry, Dr. Thatcher, I know it's an emergency, but we just can't get the blasted thing started.'"



"Do you think so?"



"I think it's a possiblity. Now those two horses out there—" He pointed through the window to our stable. "They always start!"



I giggled. Father was right. We didn't need a Ford motorcar. Neither did the Bishops, really; it was just that Mr. Bishop loved new and astounding things.



Father locked the cabinet where he kept the medicines and put the key back into his pocket. I continued looking through the window toward the stable at the end of our backyard.



"Sometimes Jacob comes to the stable," I told Father suddenly.



"Jacob Stoltz?" Father turned from straightening his desk. He looked surprised. "Levi told me once that he'd seen him looking at our horses."



"Yes. Peggy's brother. He comes a lot. He doesn't hurt anything. He likes the horses."



Father smiled. "He has a horse on his own farm. Maybe he needs to get away from the farm now and then. What he likes is the roaming."



"And me," I pointed out. "I think he likes me. He gave Goldy to me."



"Of course he likes you, Katydid. Everyone does. Come now. Mother's waiting." He locked the office door behind us and we walked around to our front door. On the way, Father said, "The Stoltzes have some trouble in their family, Katy. Maybe you've noticed that Peggy seems upset."



I nodded. I had noticed. "Is it about Nellie?"



"Yes."



I did not understand what had happened. But Nellie had left the Bishops quite suddenly in July. Austin had told me. Austin said that Nellie had packed her things and left, and she was crying. No one would talk about it, not even Peggy. But Nell Stoltz was gone.



"Did she go to New York to be in the pictures, Father? Like Mary Pickford?"



Father frowned. "No, Katy. What ever made you think that? Nellie Stoltz won't ever be in the pictures."



"She wanted to."



"Well, it was a dream she had, perhaps. But she's gone back to the farm."



"But she doesn't like the farm! She never even went to visit!"



Father made an odd snorting sound. "Well, she's visiting there now," he said. "But, Katy? I don't want you to talk about Nell to Mother or to Peggy. They're already upset."



"The Bishops are upset, too. Last week I heard Mr. Bishop shouting at Paul, and then Paul went out the back door and slammed it hard. It woke Mary from her nap, the slam."