The Silent Boy

"It was the palmar fascia that protected him from worse injury," Father said. "It's very thick and strong tissue here. Below it are the nerves and muscles, and if he had sliced into those, we d have had to haul him into town and do some pretty complicated surgery."



"Wouldn't have gone," the man muttered.



"You'd ve gone or lost your hand, Sturges," Father said, laughing. He began rubbing the area of the stitches with gauze soaked from a bottle in his bag. The smell was strong and medicinal, but the liquid had no color and it dried quickly. Then Father lifted one of the stitches with a pincer in one hand, snipped it with sharp scissors in his other, pulled it through, and laid the snipped thread on a piece of gauze set out on the desk. It didn't seem to hurt the man at all. I counted as Father did it again and again.



"Sixteen," I announced, when he was done.



With the black stitches gone, I could see only a jagged pink line on the man's palm, and some tiny dots where the stitches had been. It seemed astonishing to me, to have what had seemed a terrible wound be gone entirely, turned to a faint pink line.



The man named Sturges seemed surprised as well, and kept opening and closing his hand as if he had newly learned to do it.



"Keep it clean, still," Father told him. "Wear a glove on it when you're working. And keep it limber. Sometimes a scar like that will tighten. You don't want that." He wrapped the tools he had used in a strip of cloth and replaced them in the bag. I knew why he wrapped them, because he had told me once. You could never use an instrument twice, because it might carry infection. So you wrap them and keep them set aside after they are used, until they could be properly cleaned. I tried to do it with my little toy bag of instruments, but it didn't seem to matter, really, and some of them couldn't hold together for being washed, anyway.



They shook hands, and I saw the man open and close his injured one again, after shaking, as if he were still surprised that it worked. Then he nodded to me, and said "Miss" before he turned and left.



Father snapped his bag closed, looked around, and sighed. "That boy," he said. "He slipped off while we were busy. He did it last time, too."



I was frightened. The mill with its noisy parts seemed dangerous, now that Jacob had disappeared into it. But Father told me not to worry. "I know where to find him," he said, and took my hand. "You hold on to me now, though, Katy. Here, Jackson, put this in my buggy, would you?" He handed his medical bag to the clerk who sat at a table outside the office door.



With Father's hand tight around mine, I followed him into the huge open section of the mill, where flecks of grain spun against the daylight that came in from narrow windows. Off to one side I saw workers who were dusted with flour so that their faces looked ghostly. One man laughed, and his open mouth was dark against the powdered face. I knew he was only a man, but I held Father's hand tighter while we looked for Jacob.



"He'll be by the grindstone," Father said, leaning down so that I could hear him against the noise of gears and workers. "He likes that big stone. You heard him in the buggy, making the sound."



"Father?" I asked. "Is he an imbecile? Is that what it is, to be touched in the head?"



"I wouldn't call Jacob that," Father said firmly, "because imbecile means having no brains. And Jacob, he's different, all right, but he knows how to go to what he loves, and how to stay safe near it. That takes brains, I'd say. Katy—there he is."



I looked over and saw Jacob in the shadows, watching the great stone turn and grind. He was rocking back and forth where he stood, and though I couldn't hear, I saw his hands moving at his sides and knew that he must be murmuring, "Shoooda, shoooda, shoooda." Father was right that he knew to stay safe, out of the way, and I saw that the sound and rhythm of the turning grindstone made him happy.



When Father told him it was time to go, he pretended he didn't hear. He had a funny way of doing it. He put his hands up to cover his ears, and he continued his rocking and humming. But Father touched him firmly again and mentioned the horses. "We'll give the horses a bit of grain before we leave," he told Jacob. And so he came.



We left the mill to find that the back of the buggy was piled with sacks of flour as payment. Jacob fed each horse a handful of grain and then climbed up and sat atop the flour sacks, his cap pulled low over his forehead.



We took the long way home, past the Stoltz farm, and left Peggy's brother there with a bag of flour for his family. Before he took it, he touched the necks of the horses and made a sound to them, though he said no human goodbye to us. A dog dashed to the buggy to greet him; and I saw, as he turned and walked to his own barn, carrying the flour, that two cats ran out from the shadows there, rubbed against him, matched their steps to his, and followed him in.



4. NOVEMBER 1910



 

Mother wasn't feeling well and so most mornings Peggy helped me get ready for school.



"If Jacob can't go to school," I asked her one morning as she brushed my hair, "then why can he roam all around the way he does? If I have the sniffles and can't go to school, Mother makes me stay in bed all day and drink hot water with lemon and sugar in it. And I had to stay in the house forever when I had chicken pox. But not Jacob. Father says he sees him often, very far from home. And I think he has even been here, behind our house. Levi saw him. That's four miles!"



"Jacob's been here? Are you certain? Hand me that ribbon," Peggy said, and I gave her the brown ribbon that matched the plaid of my school dress.



"Ow, don't pull so tight."



Peggy was good at braiding my hair, but sometimes she went too hard at it, trying to make it neat.



"The stable boy, Levi. He told Father."



"He told your father what? Now hold still, don't wiggle."



"He told Father that a boy comes sometimes and slips in and stands by the horses. He strokes their noses, the boy does. Levi called him a deaf-mute. But Father said no. Father said it must be Jacob, because Jacob loves the horses, but that Jacob is not a deaf-mute at all. He can hear. And Father says that though he doesn't talk like you and me, there is meaning to the sounds he makes."



Peggy nodded. "That's true."



"Why do I have to go to school, but Jacob doesn't? I would like to roam around all day in the country. I would climb trees and feed cows and and—" I thought, but nothing else came to my mind. I really didn't know what country children did. "I would play all day, the way Jacob does," I said, finally.



Peggy finished tying the ribbon at the end of the braid she had made in my hair. She straightened the sides of the bow. "There. Done," she said.



"And I would never wear a hair ribbon, either."



"You look pretty. Most girls like to look pretty." Peggy was laughing as she put the brush away and began to smooth my bedcovers.



"Anyway," she added, "Jacob don't have the sniffles or chicken pox. He's just different from most, and can't learn from books. But he don't play all day. Yes, he roams a bit. But he gets his chores done. He helps with the animals. Jacob's better than anyone with animals. It don't surprise me that he visits your horses."



"Does he comb and brush your horses at home? Levi brushes ours." I had been thinking that I might try to talk the stable boy into letting me braid Jed and Dahlia's manes, the way Peggy had just done mine.



"I suppose. And feeds them. And he watches out for the calves and lambs when they come. Sometimes they need extra care."



"Kittens, too," I said. "They probably need care."



"Come on, Naomi has your breakfast ready. Be quiet going past your mama's door. She's sleeping." Peggy started for the stairs and I followed her, tiptoeing past my parents bedroom.



"I wish I had a kitten."



"Well, our barn is full of them. That old tomcat chases the females around the barn and every time we turn around, it seems there's a new batch of kittens."



"What's a tomcat?"



Peggy chuckled. "He's a big old fella all full of himself who takes advantage of the females and next thing they know, they have kittens. Think old Tomcat stays around to help out? Not a chance. He's off looking for a new lady friend by then."



I chuckled too, not because I understood, but because Peggy made a funny gesture with her arms, imitating a stealthy cat on the prowl. "I do love kittens, though," I told her.



"Sometimes when a new litter comes and there are just too many, Jacob has to drown them."



I stopped at the foot of the stairs. "Drown?" I asked.



Peggy looked back at me. "It's what they do on farms, Katy. It's the kindest thing when there are too many. They don't know. It don't hurt them any. Jacob takes them down to the creek and it only takes a minute."



I stared at her in horror. Kittens?



"He's a gentle boy, Jacob is," she explained. "He wouldn't hurt nothing, ever."



I pondered for a moment, deciding how to feel about this. "Like when I step on ants, I suppose," I said at last. "They don't even know. Do you think it's the same, Peggy?"



"I guess. We don't need to think about it. Look! Naomi made pancakes!"



But I did think about it. I thought about the touched boy, his soft look the day that he had held apples to our horses mouths, and his gentle hands making the rhythm of the great grindstone against his thin, denim-covered thighs. I thought about his holding newborn kittens, so tiny, touching their fur with his fingers, and then lowering them into the creek and holding them under. The kindest thing, Peggy had said.



One morning late in November I found the Sears Roebuck catalogue open on Mother's desk in the parlor. I hoped she was planning to have a new dress made for me. Jessie Wood had a new one of black-and-white checks, with a sailor collar and red trim on the cuffs. She wore it to school, and I was jealous.



Usually Mother just looked at the pictures in the catalogue. Then she would have Miss Abbott, the seamstress, come. Miss Abbott would measure me all over while I stood on a stool. Mother would show her a picture and give her the fabric she had bought at Whittaker's store. Miss Abbott would study the picture and cut out a paper pattern, holding it up to me to be sure it was the right size. Then she would go away, to her own small house down on Vine Street, near the dairy, and when she came back, she would have the dress partly made, all basted together.



This was the part I liked. I would put on the basted dress, very carefully so the stitches wouldn't break, and Mother would stand me on the kitchen table. Then Miss Abbott would carefully mark the hem with her little tool that puffed chalk in a line when she squeezed the bulb. I liked how the white line appeared all the way around the bottom of my dress. Then she would take it away again and do the final stitching, and soon it would look just like the dress in the picture Mother had chosen.



When I found the catalogue there, I turned the pages until I found one that showed little girls, and in my mind I chose the dress I wanted, though I knew Mother would say no. It was too fancy. Carefully I sounded out the words that described it: "White lawn trimmed with lace," it said below the picture. "Neat belt of silk ribbon with rosette in front." I didn't know the word rosette, but I could tell from the picture that it was a wonderful bunched thing like a flower, maybe a peony not quite in bloom.