The Silent Boy Read Free

around her mother's hip as if to ride.
    "We'll be good to your daughter, Mrs. Stoltz," Father said, "and my wife will be grateful for her help."
    Peggy hadn't said anything at all. She simply stood, like someone accustomed to waiting. She had, I thought, a pretty face, with cheeks as pink as her little sister's; you could see a strength in it, too, and that one day she would look like her mother, proud and loving. Her brown hair was pulled up and back but the breeze pulled it away and it flew in wisps around her face.
    Father lifted me to the buggy seat and as he did, Peggy went to her mother and hugged her,wrapping her arms around the little one, too, who began to wail. "Want my Peg," the little girl cried, holding out her arms, but by then Father was helping Peggy up into the seat beside me. Mrs. Stoltz said, "Be sure to give Nellie our love." Then she hushed the little girl and turned away. At a window of the house, I saw a curtain move aside,
and a face appeared; then a hand, pressed against the glass. I thought Peggy ought to know. I nudged her and pointed to the window.
    "That's Jacob," Peggy explained to me, the first words I heard her say. She waved to the face in the window, and after a moment the curtain dropped back and the boy disappeared behind it.
    There was a Jacob in my school, a fourth-grader, and I wondered if it was the same boy. Farm children came into town for school, some of them, until they left to work the farms or, as Peggy, to hire out.
    "How old is he? Does he go to school?" I asked, as the horses started up and Father clucked at them and turned them into the road. I felt shy with Peggy; she was new to me.
    She shook her head. "Just turned thirteen," she said. "He don't go to school. He never could. He's touched."
    Touched in the head,
she meant. I had heard the phrase before, had never known exactly what it meant, but it didn't feel polite to ask anything more. As we moved at a trot down the road and the Stoltz house disappeared behind us, I thought of the boy's face through the window, and the way he had slowly raised his hand to say goodbye to his big sister.
    I liked Peggy, liked feeling her beside me as we jiggled together in the buggy behind the horses
eager for home and oats; she was solid and warm and she smelled good, like soap and garden earth. I saw her hands in her lap and could see that they were shaped and hardened by work. There was a new scratch, pink and ragged, across the back of her right hand, and I touched it, without thinking.
    She smiled. "Kitten," she said. "It meant no harm."
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    Many of the families in our neighborhood had hired girls. They came in from the farms, leaving their large families behind with one less mouth to feed, usually in fall after helping with the harvest. They moved into attic rooms, doing the housework and laundry, helping mothers with new babies. They were accustomed to cold bedrooms and hard work. Indoor plumbing was new to many of the hired girls.
    Some of them didn't stay long. They met town boys and married, or saved their money for secretarial school and went off to better themselves.
    Peggy's sister Nell lived next door, in the Bishops' attic. I saw her every day in the yard, hanging up the laundry to dry. She helped Mrs. Bishop take care of Laura Paisley, who was lively and curious and into everything, now that she was two. When I went to play with Austin, Nell pushed the mop through our toys, pretending she was
going to mop us up. She was strong and pretty, with a great halo of bright red hair, and Austin said she made them all laugh. But I heard Mrs. Bishop tell Mother that she was afraid Nell would leave them. She had just turned sixteen but she had ambitions, Mrs. Bishop said, as if
ambitions
meant measles, something we should try not to catch.
    Peggy seemed quieter, more serious, and even her hair was a subdued brown, with none of the flamboyance of her sister's. Mother greeted her and showed her around the house; I followed behind,