The Silent Boy

"A whole group has gone out Lawton County Road, looking. I saw them gathered at the police station when I walked past," Naomi was telling Mother. Mother nodded distractedly and began to set some places at the kitchen table. Father would be hungry when he came in. I could tell from the way Naomi talked, excited but not especially alarmed, that she did not know the whole of it, that she simply thought the touched boy had run off and needed finding before he caught pneumonia from the rain.



When the table was set, I stood with my back to Mother while she did my buttons.



"I recollect when those Cooper boys got lost out near Fielder's Pond. They d gone looking for frogs and wandered too far. My land, they was just little things, then. Maybe five and six?" Naomi began to slice bread. She chattered on and didn't seem to notice that Mother was silent and tense, not listening to her.



I felt her fingers fumbling at the back of my dress and perceived her silence as that of a person stunned. I felt the same way, now, speechless and paralyzed. I had obeyed Mother. I had not gone into Mary's room. But the door had been open a crack, and I had pushed it open further and peeked. I knew, now, what she had seen there, because I had seen it, too.



16. OCTOBER 1911



Father came in through the back door with another man, their clothes dripping. He had left the buggy standing in the driveway, the horses there in the rain; it was unusual for him to do that. They should have been taken to the stable and rubbed down. He should be calling Levi to come and tend them, to rub them down and give them oats.



But the horses stood silent in the rain, and Father ignored Naomi's offer of hot coffee and a dry cloth to wipe his face and hands. He looked at Mother and she rose and took him silently to the stairs. The other man followed. I began to go with them, but Mother spoke sharply to me from the landing.



"Stay downstairs," she said. Then she felt something under her foot. Leaning down, she picked it up and handed it impatiently to me. "Put this away, Katy. It's left from your party."



I took it from her, knowing she was mistaken, but said nothing. I put it into my pocket.



I heard their voices upstairs, moving down the hall toward Mary's room. I knew what they would see there and wondered what they would do. It didn't seem to matter much. Nothing did. Except, perhaps, Jacob.



I checked the baby, who was still sleeping soundly on the parlor sofa, her small hands outstretched. Then I pulled on a heavy jacket from the hall closet, and when Naomi was turned toward the stove and didn't see me slip through the kitchen, I let myself out the back door and ran through the rain to the stable.



I found him there, huddled behind the hay bales, in the corner where I had once come upon Nellie and Paul, near the shelf where the can of harness oil was kept, and beside the covered barrel of oats and the bridles and harness hung from hooks on the wall. He was half-asleep but shivering, his clothes very wet. I knew he had been there for hours. He must have been alarmed when Father entered in the night and moved the horses out. Knowing his way of being, I thought that he had probably been sitting close to the horses and then had run to hide when he heard Father come.



He clutched the handle of a rake as if he might have need of a weapon.



"Here," I said to him, and held the gold-flecked brown marble out. "You dropped this on our stairs."



He released the rake, took the marble from me, put it into his pocket where it clicked against the other, and looked at the floor. His shoulders were hunched, and he still shivered with cold. I went and got a horse blanket from where it hung folded over the door of the stall. I draped it over Jacob's shoulders.



We sat silently together there in the stable, and I sorted out a clear picture of what had happened. Slowly I said it all to Jacob, knowing he would not respond, but the saying of it fixed it firmly in my mind, and I knew I would have to explain it soon to the others.



"Nellie had a baby, didn't she? And she didn't want it. It was born but she wouldn't take it, wouldn't feed it."



He was silent.



I could picture the cold bedroom of the little farmhouse. Probably they had moved Anna to her parents room again when Nellie went home in disgrace. And for the past two days Peggy had been there, too, to help. I pictured the family gathered there in anguish while Nellie gave birth to a baby who came unwanted into the world.



"Did it come early, Jacob? It was very small. Much smaller than Mary was when she was born, and even smaller than the Shafers' twins.



"Was it born alive? I know some aren't."



He made a sound, then, and at first I thought he was imitating the sound of a kitten, something I had heard him do in the past. But he made the mewing sound again, and I knew, suddenly, that it was the sound of the newborn baby.



I touched his shoulders through the thick plaid blanket and he did not pull away. "It was like the kittens, wasn't it? You used to take the new kittens down to the creek. Peggy told me. She said you were gentle with them. Did you do that to the baby, Jacob?"



He cried out then, harshly, and pulled his shoulders away from my hand.



The door to the stable opened, and my father was standing there. "Katy," he said to me, "I have to take the boy in now."



I stood in front of Jacob as if to shield him. "He meant no harm, Father!"



"The court will decide."



I could feel Jacob's fear behind me, and with it something else. Anger. He had responded with that harsh, angry cry when I talked about the kittens. Suddenly I became aware of what had happened.



"Father!" I said. "I need to know—"



"Katy, a terrible thing has happened that you know nothing about," Father said in a stern voice. "I must take the boy now."



"But I do know, Father! I saw it! I looked into Mary's room and saw it! The red hair made me know it was Nellie's," I said, whispering it, explaining it to myself.



"And it was wet. But, Father, I need to know this: was the baby wet, or was it just the feed sack, from the rain?"



Father looked at me, puzzled, and I think saddened that I had seen. "The baby's body was dry," he said.



I turned back to Jacob. "I'm sorry," I told him. "I was wrong, Jacob. It was like the lamb, wasn't it? Its mother turned away, but you found a better mother who already had a baby of her own so she could feed it. Remember? I saw it in your barn, the day you gave Goldy to me."



I thought of that lamb, as fleecy as a child's toy, comfortable in the pen beside the mother that Jacob had found to save its life. Alive, fed, the lamb bore no resemblance to the limp, gray, staring thing wrapped in the wet feed sack that I had glimpsed in Mary's crib. But Jacob had meant only to save Nellie's baby by bringing it to my mother. I was certain of that. It was just too small, and the night too cold and wet; the journey was too long.



Outside, behind Father, through the rain, I heard heavy feet on the back steps. More men had arrived and were entering our house. I knew there was very little time left. I turned back to Jacob.



"You must come now, Jacob," I told him. "They're looking for you." I lifted the blanket from him and helped him stand. Though he had always withdrawn from my touch in the past, now he let me hold his hand and take him to the house, where the men were waiting. My father led the way.



"Father," I called, as they took Jacob away, "don't let them take his cap."



I never saw the touched boy again. The court determined that he should be confined to the Asylum at the edge of town, and I thought of him there in that many-windowed stone building where people screamed or sat silent. I hoped that they would let him roam outdoors, though I think I knew they would not. I hoped he would be given a kitten, though I knew he would not.



He was fourteen then. It was 1911. Nearly fifty years later the Asylum closed its doors. The remaining patients, subdued by new medications, returned to their families or were moved to other places. But his name appeared on no list that I ever saw, and there seemed to be no record by then of a Jacob Stoltz. Perhaps in long-ago discarded papers one could have found some mention of him, proof that he had existed, that he had loved animals and had once tried to save an unnamed baby but had failed.



17. PAUL, AFTER



 

Paul Bishop rarely returned to the house where he had spent his early years, grown to manhood, and fathered a child. He graduated from a Connecticut boarding school and went on to Princeton as his parents had hoped, and from there to law school, where he spent two and a half restless, dissatisfied years.



When he was twenty-three and war was raging in Europe, Paul Bishop left law school against his parents' wishes and enlisted in the U.S. Marines. He came home after his basic training to say goodbye to his family before he left for France, but it was a harsh parting shadowed with blame and anger.



Austin and I were in our teens by then, and our childhood friendship had turned into the shy beginning of something more. We sat together on the front porch and watched while Mr. Bishop set up his camera. Paul's mother came from the house and stood beside her husband's newest automobile. Her son, wearing a uniform and high brown boots, stood stiff and awkward as a stranger on her other side, and they did not move close enough to touch. The brim of Paul's hat shaded his eyes. At the last moment Laura Paisley ran forward and handed her new puppy to her mother.



Mr. Bishop fiddled with his camera and then ordered them to smile, but they appeared unable. I remember that Peggy, who would be leaving us soon, watched through the parlor window of our house, and I could not put a name to the look on her face.



On June 5, 1918, Lieutenant Bishop of the 4th Marine Brigade died in battle at a place called Belleau Wood, fifty miles from Paris.



18. NELL, AFTER



 

No one, not even her family, ever really knew where Nellie went when she left the farm soon after that October night. For years I looked for her in the movies, reading the lists of minor characters, searching for her name or for the name Evangeline Emerson, which she had chosen once as more glamorous than her own.



Someone, a friend of my father's, once thought he saw her in Baltimore, working in a tavern. At least, he said, it was a plump, red-headed woman with a loud laugh and a tired look, and she was known to everyone as Nellie. We wondered whether to tell Peggy. But we decided that it would be cruel, so we kept silent.



19. PEGGY, AFTER



 

Peg stayed with us until Mary started school. Then, when she was twenty-one years old, she went back home and married Floyd Lehman, the farmhand who had waited all those years. We attended their wedding at the country church and gave them a gift of gold-rimmed dishes like those she had loved at our house.



Eventually Peggy and Floyd took over the Stoltz farm, added rooms and plumbing to the house, and lived there with their three little girls and Peggy's parents. Pup lived on there, too, until he was seventeen years old, and for all those years he lifted his head, waiting, each time the door opened, as if someone he had lost might be returning.



20. SCHUYLER'S MILL, AFTER



The ruins of the burned mill remained untouched for many years. When Austin and I were married, in 1928, his parents and mine, together, bought the property and gave it to us as a wedding gift. It took us two years to turn it into a home. By then automobiles were no longer a novelty but an everyday reality, and the road, once dirt, had been paved. It was easy for me to live out in the countryside, a short trip by car to the hospital if I was called in for an emergency.