The Silent Boy (16 page)

Paul Bishop rarely returned to the house where he had spent his early years, grown to manhood, and fathered a child. He graduated from a Connecticut boarding school and went on to Princeton as his parents had hoped, and from there to law school, where he spent two and a half restless, dissatisfied years.

When he was twenty-three and war was raging in Europe, Paul Bishop left law school against his parents' wishes and enlisted in the U.S. Marines. He came home after his basic training to say goodbye to his family before he left for France, but it
was a harsh parting shadowed with blame and anger.

Austin and I were in our teens by then, and our childhood friendship had turned into the shy beginning of something more. We sat together on the front porch and watched while Mr. Bishop set up his camera. Paul's mother came from the house and stood beside her husband's newest automobile. Her son, wearing a uniform and high brown boots, stood stiff and awkward as a stranger on her other side, and they did not move close enough to touch. The brim of Paul's hat shaded his eyes. At the last moment Laura Paisley ran forward and handed her new puppy to her mother.

Mr. Bishop fiddled with his camera and then ordered them to smile, but they appeared unable. I remember that Peggy, who would be leaving us soon, watched through the parlor window of our house, and I could not put a name to the look on her face.

On June 5, 1918, Lieutenant Bishop of the 4th Marine Brigade died in battle at a place called Belleau Wood, fifty miles from Paris.

No one, not even her family, ever really knew where Nellie went when she left the farm soon after that October night. For years I looked for her in the movies, reading the lists of minor characters, searching for her name or for the name Evangeline Emerson, which she had chosen once as more glamorous than her own.

Someone, a friend of my father's, once thought he saw her in Baltimore, working in a tavern. At least, he said, it was a plump, red-headed woman with a loud laugh and a tired look, and she was
known to everyone as Nellie. We wondered whether to tell Peggy. But we decided that it would be cruel, so we kept silent.

Peg stayed with us until Mary started school. Then, when she was twenty-one years old, she went back home and married Floyd Lehman, the farmhand who had waited all those years. We attended their wedding at the country church and gave them a gift of gold-rimmed dishes like those she had loved at our house.

Eventually Peggy and Floyd took over the Stoltz farm, added rooms and plumbing to the house, and lived there with their three little girls and Peggy's parents. Pup lived on there, too, until he was seventeen years old, and for all those years he
lifted his head, waiting, each time the door opened, as if someone he had lost might be returning.

The ruins of the burned mill remained untouched for many years. When Austin and I were married, in 1928, his parents and mine, together, bought the property and gave it to us as a wedding gift. It took us two years to turn it into a home. By then automobiles were no longer a novelty but an everyday reality, and the road, once dirt, had been paved. It was easy for me to live out in the countryside, a short trip by car to the hospital if I was called in for an emergency.

Our children grew up here, went away when they were grown, and brought their own little ones
here to visit. Now the grandchildren bring theirs. Until his death last year, Austin, a historian, sat every day in his office, writing, and looked out at the creek rushing past. He said it helped him think.

I still hear it at night, the tumble and foam of the water, and sometimes, in my memory, I can hear the
shoooda, shoooda, shoooda
of the great grindstone and I picture the touched boy standing there, watching.