The Silent Boy (13 page)

I was just beginning to read
A Girl of the Limberlost
aloud to Mother as she did some
needlework. She was embroidering a collar to replace one that had faded, on her blue linen dress.

I would be nine in two months.

I looked up at the end of the first chapter. "I can't understand how
mean
Elnora's mother is," I said. "She doesn't even mind when her own daughter is humiliated in school!"

My own mother smiled. "If she were a perfect mother, the book wouldn't be so interesting," she pointed out.

I thought it over and nodded, because she was right, and I went on to the next chapter.

A late-day breeze lifted the vines growing along the side of the porch. The moonflowers and morning glories shaded the porch, and all summer we had flowers at the beginning and end of the day. The entire neighborhood was shaded by tall elms. Across the street, Mrs. Stevenson was watering the late-blooming rosebushes in her side yard, moving carefully from one to the next, tilting the large spouted can.

Next door, the shades were drawn on the windows of the Bishops house. Often we drew the shades down to keep the house cool. But the house next door, where Austin lived, had an uncomfortable, inhospitable silence to it. There had been trouble there.

"How quiet it is. The sound of my pages turning
is the only sound," I said to Mother.

But she shook her head and said, "Listen!" And of course then I could hear birds.

"A robin," she said, "with that wonderful throaty song."

"Like gargling," I told her, and we both made a face. Father always makes us gargle with hot salt water for sore throats.

"They'll fly south next month," Mother said. "I always wonder how they—

"Shhh!" she said suddenly. She put down her embroidery hoop and lifted a finger. "What's that?"

We both listened intently. The robin had fallen silent, interrupted by another noise, which seemed to come from the south, toward town, beyond the Methodist church at the corner of the next block. It was a rapid staccato sound, abrupt and ugly, as if some large machinery were starting, stopping, and laboring mightily in between.

Several young boys appeared, running down the middle of the street toward our house, laughing and calling as they looked back. I recognized the Cooper brothers from the next block.

"Here he comes!" one of them called to us. By now several neighbors had come to their porches, and across the street, Mrs. Stevenson had put down her watering can and was watching. From our kitchen, Naomi appeared at the screen door,
wiping her hands on her apron, with Gram beside her. Through the open bedroom window I heard Mary stir and whimper upstairs.

The noise had become downright deafening, and then we saw him: Mr. Bishop, Austin's father, grinning with pride, behind the steering mechanism of an automobile as he jounced and sputtered past our house, coming finally to a stop just in front of his own. The machine gave a sort of wheeze, and there was a smoky smell about it. The Cooper brothers had come close and were eyeing it with excitement, curiosity, and fear. From the next block their mother approached, holding a wooden spoon in her hand—she must have been preparing supper. Walking rapidly down from the corner, she called to her boys. "Stand back!" she cried out in alarm. "It might explode!"

Mr. Bishop was wearing goggles. He removed them with a flourish and leapt from the seat of the thing. "You're in no danger," he reassured the Cooper brothers, who hadn't moved an inch, despite their mother's shouted warning. "I'll take the two of you for a spin," he added, and their eyes went wide in delight.

"But first, my wife," he announced. Mrs. Bishop, with Laura Paisley on her hip, had appeared on their porch and was looking with horror at the thing. "Louise?" he called to her proudly. "I have some goggles for you, and a duster!" He held up a
garment that was folded beside him on the seat.

"Paul," she called back, "you have taken leave of your senses!"

"
Me,
Father! Take me!" Austin had come from the house now, and down the steps, and was eagerly examining the machine. In a minute Austin was perched beside his father and they were sputtering noisily down the street, while the Cooper boys, wild with envy on the brick sidewalk, looked on. My father, summoned by the commotion, had come from his office with several patients right behind him, and they all stood on the sidewalk, watching.

"Isn't that something!" Father said in an admiring voice. Mrs. Cooper, still holding her spoon, commiserated with Mrs. Bishop and my mother about the extravagant foolishness of men.

 

The Bishops were the first family in town to own a motorcar, and it cost nine hundred dollars: enough, Peggy said to me as she spooned oatmeal into Mary that evening, to feed a family of orphans for a year.

"I am not at all sure that there can be such a thing as a family of orphans," I told her. "Doesn't a family mean a father and a mother, as well as children? So if the children are orphans, then—"

Peggy frowned at me and I knew enough to
change the subject. Peggy didn't frown often, but her frown was fierce.

"Mr. Bishop says Father should get one. He said it would be an amazing help in case of medical emergencies," I told her. "You know how long it takes for the boy to harness the horses and bring them around. But if he had a Ford automobile, he could simply telephone the garage, and—"

Mary put her hand, suddenly, into the dish of oatmeal and from there into her hair. Peggy sighed and went to the sink to dampen a cloth.

The hall clock struck six. Mother was setting the table for supper. Naomi had made us chicken and corn soup, and there was lovely-smelling fresh-baked bread.

"Katy," Mother said, "go and see if your father will be finished soon." So I scampered away to find him and made the suggestion again as I watched him tidy his office. "So you see, Father, you would simply telephone the garage, and—"

"—and the man at the garage would say, 'I'm so sorry, Dr. Thatcher, I know it's an emergency, but we just can't get the blasted thing started.'"

"Do you think so?"

"I think it's a possiblity. Now those two horses out there—" He pointed through the window to our stable. "They
always
start!"

I giggled. Father was right. We didn't need a Ford motorcar. Neither did the Bishops, really; it
was just that Mr. Bishop loved new and astounding things.

Father locked the cabinet where he kept the medicines and put the key back into his pocket. I continued looking through the window toward the stable at the end of our backyard.

"Sometimes Jacob comes to the stable," I told Father suddenly.

"Jacob Stoltz?" Father turned from straightening his desk. He looked surprised. "Levi told me once that he'd seen him looking at our horses."

"Yes. Peggy's brother. He comes a lot. He doesn't hurt anything. He likes the horses."

Father smiled. "He has a horse on his own farm. Maybe he needs to get away from the farm now and then. What he likes is the roaming."

"And me," I pointed out. "I think he likes me. He gave Goldy to me."

"Of course he likes you, Katydid. Everyone does. Come now. Mother's waiting." He locked the office door behind us and we walked around to our front door. On the way, Father said, "The Stoltzes have some trouble in their family, Katy. Maybe you've noticed that Peggy seems upset."

I nodded. I had noticed. "Is it about Nellie?"

"Yes."

I did not understand what had happened. But Nellie had left the Bishops quite suddenly in July. Austin had told me. Austin said that Nellie
had packed her things and left, and she was crying. No one would talk about it, not even Peggy. But Nell Stoltz was gone.

"Did she go to New York to be in the pictures, Father? Like Mary Pickford?"

Father frowned. "No, Katy. What ever made you think that? Nellie Stoltz won't ever be in the pictures."

"She wanted to."

"Well, it was a dream she had, perhaps. But she's gone back to the farm."

"But she doesn't like the farm! She never even went to visit!"

Father made an odd snorting sound. "Well, she's visiting there now," he said. "But, Katy? I don't want you to talk about Nell to Mother or to Peggy. They're already upset."

"The Bishops are upset, too. Last week I heard Mr. Bishop shouting at Paul, and then Paul went out the back door and slammed it hard. It woke Mary from her nap, the slam."

"You know," Father said, "it occurs to me that's why his father bought the motorcar: to take their mind off things. Mmmmm. I smell soup."

Father hung his coat in the front hall and we went in to supper. Following him to the table, I wondered what he meant by
things.

Gram had gone back to Cincinnati when summer ended, as she did each year, though this time she said it was harder to go because of Mary. The baby had two teeth in the bottom of her mouth now, and a big, frequent smile. The day before she left, Mr. Bishop set up his camera once again to take a picture of Gram holding Mary. It was next to impossible to make the baby sit still, and at the last minute Laura Paisley insisted on climbing up as well, so that Gram's lap and arms were filled with babies. She said the weight was nothing compared to the joy of it.

School began in September, and my teacher was gray-haired Miss Moody, who sang in the choir at the Presbyterian church so that I saw her on Sundays as well, which seemed strange. Even stranger, Miss Moody had been my mother's third-grade teacher, twenty-five years before! On our very first day of school, Miss Moody looked at me and said, "You are Caro MacPherson's little girl, aren't you?" and for a moment I did not know what she meant. Then I remembered that my mother, though now she was Caroline Thatcher, had once been Caro MacPherson. So I said, "Yes, ma am" to Miss Moody, and she directed me to what had once been my mother's desk! Imagine, that she had remembered all those years! Even my mother was amazed, when I told her.

Austin, Jessie, and I were all in third grade now. We walked together each morning until we reached the corner where the school was; then Austin went off to be with the boys and to go in the boys door. Jessie and I walked around to the girls'. The three of us would not be friends again until the end of the day, back in our own neighborhood.

The Bishops had a new hired girl, a sister of Levi's named Flora. She was shy and nervous, not at all playful, which was a disappointment. Nellie had teased a lot and made us all laugh, but Flora did the housework silently, with her head down, and barely spoke. She was good with Laura
Paisley, though, taking her for walks, and I saw them sometimes, hand in hand, and saw that Flora talked then, as if she felt comfortable with someone three years old in a way that she otherwise did not.

I remembered Flora from my school. She had been in sixth grade when I was in first, and I remembered that she had friends then, and gossiped with the other big giggling girls on the playground while we little ones played our recess games of tag and hide-and-seek.

But now Flora had left school to go to work and help her fatherless family.

And someone else had left school as well. Austin's brother, Paul, should have been in his last year of high school this year, but he had gone away. He hadn't wanted to. It was what the shouting, the noisy arguments with his father that I had overheard, had been about. When September came, Paul's things were packed into trunks and then the trunks were lifted into the Ford motorcar and Mr. Bishop drove him to the train station. Their faces were both like stone and they did not speak to each other. On their porch, Mrs. Bishop cried, and Austin waved goodbye. Then Paul went off by train to a boarding school in Connecticut.

"It's a very fine school, Katy," Mother said, when I asked her why Paul had been made to go so far away. "It will prepare him to go to Princeton like
his father, and to become a lawyer eventually. Many boys go off to boarding school if their families have the means."

It was a school, she said, only for boys, and I wondered how Paul would feel about that, because he was quite the flirt. I knew he and Nellie had been sweet on each other, but Paul had taken another girl, one from the high school, to the spring cotillion in June, and bought her a camellia corsage. Austin had told me that Paul and the girl won the prize for the Turkey Trot, and Nellie had been very angry when she heard of it, but Paul had laughed at her.

It was the most popular dance. Jessie and I had been practicing it in my room, and we made so much noise that Mother said she was afraid the parlor ceiling would fall down. I thought it served Paul Bishop right to be at a school where there would be no Turkey Trot. Now there would be no girl for him to dance it with, and no Nellie, either, to kiss in the barn and sneer at after.

 

I wanted a birthday party. Last year, on my eighth birthday, I had been in bed with chicken pox and had opened my gifts in my bedroom, stopping now and then to scratch even though Father kept telling me not to.

Now, about to be nine, looking through the
things stored in the attic, I found our pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, the donkey printed on a big oilcloth and punctured with pinholes from other parties. I brought it downstairs and showed Peggy. She had never seen one before.