The Silent Boy

Page 8

The entire mill was gone, they had told him, just the walls left standing, and the grindstone lying in the rubble. Men had come from everywhere to fight the fire and some of them were burned.
Father said at breakfast he hoped they would live but wasn't sure. He and other doctors had worked all that night. But when I asked him to tell me what it was like, and what the doctors did, both Mother and Peggy shushed me.
"It's bad for the baby to talk about such things," Peggy explained, taking me aside later that morning, when she was ironing. "It would upset your mama, and then the baby will be damaged."
"I don't see how. The baby's very cozy inside. It floats, Father told me, and swims."
"Babies can be marked," Peggy said in a serious voice. "I heard of a woman who was frightened by a runaway horse, and her baby was born with a mane and tail."
"Peggy!" I sputtered with laughter. "I know that can't be true! You didn't really see it, did you?"
"Well, no, but I heard."
"Someone was fooling you."
Peggy thought about it and smiled, finally. "Maybe," she admitted. "But it is true that you mustn't upset a mother-to-be. You know the boy who delivers the groceries from the market?"
"Yes." It was a boy from my school, actually, a sixth-grader named Edward, who brought the groceries in his wagon. My mother always gave him a nickel at the back door.
"He was marked on his face when his mother was carrying him. She likely saw something hideous and put her hand to her face in just that place."
Edward had a pale pink stain across his chin and cheek. "Father calls it a birthmark," I told Peggy.
"You see?"
I didn't, exactly, and resolved to ask Father more about it when we were alone together.
Peggy set the iron back on the stove to reheat. She folded the heavy sheet she d been ironing, set it aside, and took another, damp and rolled, from the basket. The moisture and heat felt good in the kitchen with the cold weather outdoors.
"Peg? Is touched the same as marked?"
"Touched?" She looked at me, puzzled, as she laid the sheet out on the board.
"Jacob. You said he was touched."
The hot iron sizzled when she laid it on the sheet, and she moved it so that it wouldn't scorch.
Peggy chuckled. She looked fond. Always when she spoke of her brother, she got that fond look. "My mother says 'touched by the Lord,' and I think it's true.
"My pa, though, he don't think that," she confided. "He wishes he had him a boy who could take on the farm one day. Jacob can't ever."
"But you said he's good with animals." I had seen it, too, watching him with our own horses—for he had come many evenings now, and I had seen him there, in the stable—but I didn't talk to Peggy about Jacob's visits. It was not that they were wrong, or even secret, but they seemed private. "I've seen him with our horses, Peggy. It's almost as if he can speak their special language."
"He does have a way with animals," Peggy agreed. "But a farm is more than animals. There's the crops. The planting and the harvest. Taking care of the plow and the harnesses. Buying the seed. My pa has to go to the feed store and bargain and trade.
"And the butchering, too," she added. "It troubles my pa that Jacob runs and hides at butchering time. He feels them animals to be his friends. He can't be there when their time comes, and it angers Pa."
"But the kittens, Peggy! You told me about the kittens, when there are too many. You said Jacob is the one who—" I just couldn't say the rest.
She folded the ironed sheet and laid it on the pile. "Want to do your father's hanky?" she asked, picking up the small damp cloth from the basket.
So I took the hot iron and guided it across the square of linen. The iron was heavy, and it was not as easy as it looked, to get the handkerchief flattened perfectly and dry. Peggy helped me with her strong hand on mine.
"New kittens," she explained, "aren't the same as the kind you like to play with, all whiskers and fur and jumping around. Newborn, they don't seem like nothing lovable yet. Jacob does it quick and then forgets it, and even the mother cat don't seem to care.
"My land, look there in the corner of the hanky," she said, and ran her finger across the embroidered HWT. "His initials. I see that every time I iron, and think how wonderful it is to have your name be so important."
We heard a knock at the front door, and then Mother called from the hall.
"Katy! Jessie's here and wants to play!"
"Don't bring her in here, Katy," Peggy whispered. "She gets into everything and her hands are always dirty."
I laughed because it was true. Jessie Wood was my best girlfriend, but she was always a source of trouble. Mischief, sometimes, though I tried to steer her from it; and even if she wasn 't into mischief, Jessie stumbled into things, dropped them, broke them, dirtied them. I left Peggy to the ironing and took Jessie up to my bedroom, where we could play with our paper dolls. Mother had given us last year's Sears Roebuck catalogue, and Jessie and I had made us a fine set of families from it. Now we were furnishing houses for them, choosing the furniture from the pages and making a life for our paper families. Jessie's was grand, with the most expensive suites and fancy wallpapers. But I had decided on a plainer life for mine, maybe on a farm, and I set about choosing overalls forthefather,andaplow.Igavethelittleboy—I had cut him out the last time we had played—a pair of overalls, too; now I chose some sturdy shoes for him, so that when he roamed, as I thought he might, he would be warm and comfortable.
I made Jessie wipe her feet because it was thawing now, as February turned to March, and muddy in places where the snow was gone on the path. Then I made her wash her hands before we got the paper dolls out. Last time we played, I hadn't, and she got dirt smears on a fine Summer Leghorn Hat of Real Japanese Silk that she wanted for the lady in her paper doll family.
Jessie washed her hands, but she said our bathroom smelled peculiar.
And it was true. Peggy had taken Father's clothes away, the ones he had worn all night at the hospital, but the smell from them remained. Peggy told me later it was the smell of burned people on him; she opened the window wide, though it was cold outside, and scrubbed the bathroom with carbolic acid.
It was only one week later that we heard the terrible, terrible news from New York. Peggy gasped and made a sound like "Oh!" when she heard at first, because her sister Nellie had been talking lately about New York, about going there to work and earn some money and maybe make her way into the pictures.
It was young girls like Nellie, and some even younger, who were working there and were caught in that terrible fire. From the eighth floor, the newspaper said, they jumped, some of them holding hands, their skirts and hair afire. Hundreds of them. Their bodies lay in heaps, smoldering, in the street. I thought of the smell of Father's clothes.
There was a list in our paper of all of them, the Mollys, Rosies, Annas, and even a Kate, my name, fourteen years old. Some of them weren't even identified; no one knew who they were.
One was only eleven, and her name was Mary.
In New York, thousands of people lined the streets in mourning for those working girls who wanted only to earn a better life for themselves. It was raining, and the newspaper picture showed thousands of umbrellas; I wanted to be there, holding a black umbrella, with rain dripping from the edge, and to bow my head as they were carried past, to the cemetery.
I was filled with a feeling of frustration at having no way to mourn for them. Finally, when no one was around to see, I went into Mother's room, opened her bureau drawer, and looked carefully through all of her ironed, folded shirtwaists. I was looking for a label that said Triangle Shirtwaist Company. I would tear it, scribble on it with ink, punish it in every way I knew.
But I found none there. Mother's clothes had been made for her, most of them, by Miss Abbott.
Instead, I made up a little prayer for Mary Goldstein, age eleven, who had died that day. I said it every night for several weeks. "Dear Mary Goldstein, please be happy in heaven and don't be frightened or on fire ever again, and now you can fly instead of falling." I murmured it every night before I went to sleep, adding "Amen" at the conclusion, so that God knew it was a prayer even though it hadn't been addressed to him.
8. MARCH 1911
"Please take me, Father!"
It was Saturday afternoon, so there was no school. Peggy had gone to visit her parents. Jessie was being punished for some mischief and was not allowed to play, and Austin was visiting his cousins in Harrisburg. Mother was resting upstairs. I was very bored.
The buggy was waiting, and Father was looking through his medical bag to be sure he had what he might need. We were in his office, and I watched while he added a small bottle of a white powder that he kept in the locked cabinet. The call summoning him had come just after lunch.
"You know I'm not a bother!"
He snapped the bag closed. "Of course you're not. Sometimes you're even a help, Katydid."
"Then may I come?"
"I won't be able to take you inside, Katy. It's not a patient's home, you know, where you can sit in the kitchen and wait. Not like the mill, where the men always thought it a fine thing that you were my helper. This is like a hospital."
"I won't mind. I can wait in the buggy. The horses will like me to do that. They get lonely waiting by themselves. And I'll take a book."
Father laughed. "All right. Let me just go tell your mother that you're coming along," he said.
And so, for the first time, an hour later, I found myself at the Asylum. I had seen it only at a distance before.
On the outskirts of town, the massive stone building was set in the center of expansive grounds surrounded by a wall with an iron gate. Carved deep into one of the stone pillars that formed the side of the gate were the letters that spelled Asylum, a word I could not have pronounced from sounding out the letters. Once, some time ago, when we drove past, Father had told me how to say it, and what it meant.
"I believe the dictionary would call it 'a place of protection, " he had said.
"But who needs to be protected?"
"People who are ill and can't take care of themselves."
"So it's a hospital, really," I said. "Yes. In a way."
"Jessie says it's for crazy people. She said imbeciles and lunatics and madmen."
Father smiled. "Those are just other words for people who are ill," he explained. "Ill in their minds. And at the Asylum, people take care of them."
"Jessie's afraid of it."
"No need," Father said.
"Jessie's afraid of bugs, too. I'm not." I felt quite smug.
But in truth, on this day, when the heavy gate was actually opened by the attendant in the gatehouse and Father drove the buggy inside the grounds, I did feel a little frightened. The building was so large—I counted five floors, and that was only in the central section; there were wings to the sides—and so silent.
Paths curved around the grounds, and benches dotted the landscape here and there, but on this late-March day no one was strolling or sitting outdoors. There was still leftover snow not yet melted, and the air was chilly. Father had wrapped a blanket around me and made me wear my mittens.