The Silent Boy

Page 3

Peggy laughed. "Mice are nothing to be scared of. But maybe you do need a cat."
I opened the door to the unfinished part of the third floor and let Peggy peek in. There were windows, so it wasn't dark. But it was rough, with cobwebbed beams across the top, and dust everywhere. We could see the shape of trunks, and stacked boxes.
"My own baby clothes are in that trunk there in the corner," I told Peggy, and pointed. "Mother let me have a few things for my doll, but we're saving all the nice clothes because maybe someday we will have another baby."
Peggy smiled.
"And see there? The trunk with the curved top? My grandmother's wedding gown is in there, and if I want, I can wear it when I get married. But I mustn't grow too much, because my grandmother was very small. I'll show you sometime."
"I must go down now," Peggy said. "Your mother will be wondering where I am."
So I closed the attic door and followed her down to the kitchen, where Pepper was sleeping in the corner. Naomi left work early on Sundays—she never missed the Sunday evening service at her church—but she had made us an apple pie, and Mother had put it into the oven to warm. The whole house was fragrant. I watched as Peggy put on the apron Mother gave her. I could tell from the look of her—her flushed cheeks, her slow smile, and the way she tied the apron with her strong hands—that she liked us, liked our house, and that she would be happy here.
But I wondered about Jacob, the touched boy, and how he felt to have his second big sister taken away.
3. OCTOBER 1910
Jacob Stoltz was standing beside the road when Father took me with him to the country one Saturday morning in October, just after my eighth birthday. I was recovering from chicken pox, and Father said the fresh air would perk me up. I was startled to see Peggy's brother there, because we were not very near the Stoltz farm. We were going toward the flour mill, out the Lawton County Road. One of the helpers at the mill had cut his hand badly, on a piece of machinery. Father had stitched it, he told me, just the way the seamstress, Miss Abbott, might stitch fabric together with her shiny needle tapping against the thimble on her other hand.
"Not like the hem of your dress, Katydid," Father said, as I turned over the edge on my knees to look at Miss Abbott's neat stitches, which barely showed. "More like the way she sews satin binding on the edge of a blanket, bigger stitches. And I use special very strong thread. Today I'll pull the stitches out if the wound has healed."
As it happened, there was a worn blanket folded in the back of the buggy, under Father's bag. I turned around and tugged at it so that I could examine the stitches and imagine how they would look in the flesh of a hand.
That was when I felt Father pull back on the reins so that the buggy slowed to a stop. "It's Peggy s brother," he said. "Shall we give him a ride?"
I dropped the corner of the blanket I'd been examining and turned to look down at the boy who had appeared suddenly at the roadside. I had seen him only once before: the blurred face in the window the day we had picked up Peggy from the farm a month before. I remembered that he was thirteen, five years older than I. He was thin, I saw now, and tall for his age, and, I thought, still growing fast, for his overalls were riding up his ankles and he would soon need longer. He was wearing a cap that brimmed his forehead, and he looked up at us from its shadow.
"Hello there, Jacob," I heard Father say. "Did you sense we'd be along this way? You certainly wander about. You're a far piece from home."
The boy's look was not one of recognition, though Father knew him and called him by name, but it was not fearful or suspicious, either.
"This is my daughter, Katy. We're going to Schuyler's Mill," Father told him, as if they were to have a normal conversation. "But we won't be there long, and we could take you home after, if you'd like to ride with us."
The boy turned and looked at the horses. His face changed and softened.
Father reached into the basket that Mother had placed by my feet. He took out two apples and handed them down. "Here, Jacob," Father said. "Give them a treat. Then hop up on the back."
"They're Jed and Dahlia," I told him. "Dahlia's the one with the white by her nose."
The boy's expression didn't change. He held the apples one by one to the big wrinkled mouths and waited while the horses chewed, shaking their heads and dripping juice onto the road. Then he went to the buggy behind me and hauled himself up.
He made a clucking noise, imitating Father's voice to the horses as we started up. I could see Father smile at the sound. "You like those horses, don't you, Jacob?" he said. "And the mill, too. Remember? You went with me before. You liked the gears and wheels, how they turned."
"When did you take him?" I asked, pulling at my father's sleeve a little. He had taken me to the mill before. But it surprised me, if he had taken this strange boy, and made me a little jealous, to think of someone else sitting beside Father in the buggy, in my place.
Father chuckled and gathered me against his side in a kind of hug. "You're in school most days now, Katy, and sometimes I like the company of a quiet boy like this one. Isn't that right, Jacob?"
I turned my head and looked back at him, but he ducked down so I couldn't see his face under the cap that he wore. Then, as I watched, he moved his hands against his own knees and made a sound—shoooda, shoooda, shoooda—and I recognized it as the sound of the great grindstone moving over the grain, crushing it; and with the sound, Jacob's hands were making the slow circles in the same rhythm.
"Shoooda, shoooda, shoooda," I said with him, hoping, I suppose, to make a game of it, but he took no notice.
Schuyler's Creek, slow-moving and shallow, was the same stream that ran near the Stoltz farm and was where Peggy and her sister, she had told me, used to drop their shoes and stockings on the bank and wade, holding their skirts and aprons up to keep them dry. But someplace in the miles between the Stoltz farmland and the mill, the creek changed. Father said the land went downhill and so the creek had to fall, dropping down over rocks as it carved its way, and growing faster as it fell.
I had seen pictures of the big waterfall at Niagara. Mother and Father took their wedding trip to Niagara Falls and had told me of it, the water as high as a mountain, roaring downward, sending spray into the air and collecting rainbows as it did. There was a postcard in our album at home, hand-colored, with Mother's neat penmanship beneath, explaining that it was Niagara Falls, New York, 1898.
Our little stream, Schuyler's Creek, was nothing like that. But it did rush downhill, and by the time it reached Schuyler's Mill, it was a furious thing, bubbling and racing into the great wooden wheel that took it up and turned it somehow into power.
The mill itself was a huge stone building three stories high, larger than our Presbyterian church, but with no bells. It had its own noises: the rushing noise of the water, the creaking of the wheel, and the heavy turning of the parts my father said were called the gears. Inside, there was the shoooda, shoooda, shoooda of the great grindstone. But there were also the sounds of men's shouts as they filled the wagons, the crunch of gravel under the wagon wheels, the clop of hooves—mules and horses—and the snapping of whips as the creatures strained to pull the heavy loads away.
The men and mules and horses all paused when we arrived, and the men tipped their hats to my father. "Doctor," some said. "Doctor Thatcher," said others. I sat straight beside him, proud. And I could feel Jacob stop his chanting sounds in the back of the buggy and sit straight, too.
Someone took the horses reins and held them still. Another man reached into the back and took my father's bag. I waited, biting my lip and hoping Father would not make me wait in the buggy. But he reached for me after he was on the ground, and swung me down and held my hand.
"The boy can carry my bag,"he said. The man handed it to Jacob.
I heard one man say something to another. "Imbecile," he said; he nudged the man beside him and pointed to Jacob. I wasn't certain what the word meant, but I could see that it was not meant kindly and hoped that Jacob hadn't heard.
We went with Father up the steps and entered the mill. It was dark, warm, and noisy, with each different sound playing its part, like the band concerts I had heard in summer in the town park. Austin and Jessie and I would run about the park on those summer evenings, chasing fireflies and watching the young women in their pretty dresses flirt with the boys. In the background was the music, with bright brass instruments leading the way, but up close, as we played near the bandstand and listened, we could hear the little ones—the flutes and even sometimes a tiny triangle held in the air for a moment to be touched—each putting in its sound.
Here in the mill, it was the great whooshing sound of the wheel and the splash and thunder of water, over everything. The crackle and swish of poured grain. Then the creak and grind of the wooden gears, and the deep smooth sound of the stone. Finally there were the small, almost silent sounds of the finished flour dropping into bags, and the soft thud of the bags being stacked.
I was sorry when Father led us into the office and closed the door against the sound. But I sat where he directed me and was still. Jacob set the bag down where Father pointed and in a minute the man with the bandaged hand came in, holding his hat in front of him, and nodded. "Doctor," he said, as the others had.
I didn't notice Jacob slip away. When Father opened his bag, my mind went there, as it always did, to his shiny tools and the bottles with their special smells. He had once given me a little bag so that I could doctor my dolls, and it was filled with small things, imitations, not real, and though I played with it because I knew he wished me to, I had no affection for the sugar pills or the dull scissors. I loved only the smells and the sharpness and the real importance of the tools my father used for healing.
I watched carefully as he unwrapped the man's thickly bandaged hand. "Good," he said. "You've kept it clean. There's no infection.
"Look, Katy," he told me, and nodded when I left my chair and came close, though the man with the wound seemed surprised.
The stitching thread was black against the man's pale skin. His other hand was ruddy and dark, like all workingmen's hands, but the bandage had kept the light and labor from the wounded one and made it pale. I could see where the jagged cut, shaped like a drawing of a lightning bolt, zigzagged across his palm, ending in the soft flesh at the base of his thumb.
"Move your fingers, Sturges," my father said, and when the man did, he nodded.
"Good. Now the thumb." While I watched, the large thumb bent and straightened. "Any pain?"
"Stiff is all," the man said.
"And you can feel? Try this against your fingertips. Do you make it out as chain and not a piece of wood or maybe rope?" Father handed him his watch chain and the man rolled it back and forth, and nodded. "Gold chain," he said, and grinned.
"You're a lucky man, Sturges. No real damage. Now you won't mind if I show my daughter? She wants to be a doctor."
I moved closer and Father showed me, running his own thumb across the pattern of dark stitches.