The Silent Boy (15 page)

The night had turned very cold, and the rain had become a windy downpour. Indian summer was over. Shivering in my thin nightgown, I pulled the bedroom window closed and went to ask Mother what was happening.

"There's trouble at the Stoltz farm" was all she would say. "They need help."

She let me climb into the big bed, on Father's side. We lay there side by side, her arm around me, her hand stroking my hair. After a while, I slept.

It was light when Mother stirred and sat up. I opened my eyes.

"Is Father home?"

"No, not yet. Try to sleep some more. It's very early. I'm just going to feed Mary." She rose from the bed and put on her blue dressing gown, which had been draped over a chair.

Then I heard my baby sister making her cheerful early-morning sounds—laughing and gurgling—from the nursery down the hall. Mary was six months old now and slept all night, a great blessing, for there had been times when she was younger and Mother had had to go to her again and again.

I lay snuggled in the warm cocoon of my parents' bed and listened to Mother move down the hall, open Mary's door, and speak softly to the baby. The sounds were familiar, though most often I slept through the ritual. Mother would lift her from the crib, change her wet diaper, wrap her in her pink blanket, and sit in the upholstered rocking chair while Mary nursed.

But on this ruined dawn, the sleepy ceremony of sounds was interrupted by Mother's terrible cry.

In a moment she was back, holding Mary in her arms. She thrust the baby and a clean diaper at me, and said, "Watch Mary. Change her. Don't let her fall off the bed."

Mother's face was white. She took several deep breaths. "Katy? Are you awake? Are you paying attention? I have to go use the telephone. Take care of Mary. And do not go into the nursery. Do you hear me?"

I nodded. I laid the baby on her back beside me, and she grabbed at the sheet with her chubby hands.

"Promise me! Stay out of the baby's room."

"I promise." Mary was wiggling, and I held a corner of her nightie tightly so that she wouldn't make her way to the edge of the high, wide bed and fall.

Mother hurried from the bedroom and down the stairs to the telephone in the front hall. Obediently I unpinned Mary's wet diaper and began to fold the dry one into some sort of shape that I could pin around her. I had watched Mother and Peggy do it often enough, but it seemed very complicated now that I tried it on my own. Below, I could hear Mother's voice, but I couldn't hear what she was saying because Mary had begun to whimper. When I finally had the diaper secured as best I could, I picked her up and carried her downstairs just as Mother hung up the telephone.

"She's hungry." I handed her, crying loudly now, to Mother.

"Father's coming," she said tersely. She went to a chair in the parlor and sat down to feed Mary.

"I thought he was at the Stoltzes ."

"He was. I called there. He's coming home." She stroked Mary's fine hair. The baby was quiet now, nursing.

"What's wrong, Mother?"

But she only shook her head. "Katy, you know the Stoltz boy; what's his name? Joseph?"

"Jacob."

"Yes, Jacob. I should have remembered. Your father just said it."

"Did something happen to him?"

"No. But Peggy said you had become a sort of friend to him." Mother gave an odd laugh. "She told me you wanted to invite him to your birthday party.

"Was that just yesterday?" she asked suddenly. "It seems so long ago." She lifted Mary to her shoulder and began to pat her back. "Get a rag, Katy, in case she spits."

I went to the kitchen and brought her a clean cloth from the place where Naomi kept them folded. Gently Mother wiped some milky bubbles from Mary's mouth.

"What about Jacob?"

"They're looking for him. He seems to have run off. Your father said to ask you if you know where he might have gone."

"He goes everywhere. He roams." Even as I said it, I knew where I would look for him. "I'm cold,
Mother. I'm going to go get dressed."

Mother bit her lip. "No, I think you should stay down—" Then she looked at my bare feet and my thin nightgown. I was hugging my arms around me.

"All right," she said. "Run up and put on some warm clothes. But come right back down. And don't—"

"I already promised, Mother. I won't go into Mary's room."

 

When I came downstairs, Mary was wrapped in an afghan and asleep on a corner of the parlor sofa with a chair pulled up beside so that if she rolled she wouldn't fall. I had dressed hastily and needed help with the back buttons of my brown plaid dress. Mother was in the kitchen, and I could hear Naomi's voice. Naomi always arrived early in the morning, even on rainy Sundays like this.

I went into the kitchen, needing to be where there was warmth.

"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.

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.