The Silent Boy Read Free Page B

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