The Silent Boy

The day before Katy’s birthday party, Peggy is not there. She is back on the farm helping her own family because one of the Stoltzes has fallen ill. Katy asks Jacob if his mother is ill, but he does not answer. He only shows through his rocking motions and sounds that he is very upset about whatever called Peggy back to the farm. Nervous, Katy talks incessantly, describing to Jacob where each of the bedrooms is. She does not realize how significant it will be that she has told Jacob exactly where her baby sister’s room is. Katy doesn’t know how to console Jacob, and this bothers her. She notices that he is a large and almost grown boy, “yet he seemed in other ways to be as young and unformed as Mary” (197). Katy’s party the next day is a success, with the children playing pin the tail on the donkey in the sunny backyard, as well as a game called spiderweb where the children have to follow strings of yarn to a prize. The party ends with a chilly wind and rainstorm, and she goes to bed on a cold night. She says she was asleep when “Jacob Stoltz reentered my life in a new and terrible way” (199).

Katy tries to remember what exactly wakes her; she only recalls that she heard unfamiliar sounds in the night but brushed them off. Later the telephone rings and fully wakes her. She assumes it is a patient calling for her father. She recalls other instances when her father made house calls in the night, singling out the memory of an old man: “his heart, it was, and he would not recover. We watched the funeral procession go from the church to the cemetery a few days later” (201).

But this evening is not like those other nights. Katy hears her father calling the Bishops’ house in the middle of the night, which is unusual. She sees her father speak to Mr. Bishop on the porch before Mr. Bishop gets in his motorcar and leaves. Dr. Thatcher also leaves by horse. Katy asks her mother what is going on, and she only replies that something is wrong at the Stoltz farm. Katy falls asleep in her mother’s bed with her. When they wake it is early morning, and Katy’s mother goes to check on Mary in her nursery. Katy hears her mother cry out. She brings Mary to Katy and tells her she must take care of the baby while she uses the telephone, and that she must not look in the nursery under any circumstances. Katy brings the baby downstairs, and Mrs. Thatcher says that she phoned Dr. Thatcher; he is on his way home from the Stoltz farm. He wants to know if Katy knows where Jacob is because they can’t find him. Katy goes upstairs to get dressed and promises not to look in the nursery.

Naomi, the family’s cook, arrives and tells them that a whole group is out walking and searching for Jacob. As Mrs. Thatcher helps Katy with the buttons on her dress, Katy can “perceive her silence as that of a person stunned. I felt the same way now, now, speechless and paralyzed […] I knew, now, what she had seen there, because I had seen it, too” (209).

Dr. Thatcher enters the house in a hurry with another man. Mrs. Thatcher takes them to the stairs that lead to the nursery. She stops and tells Katy to put something away that was “left from your party” (211). Katy knows that the marble her mother found is not left from the party; it is Jacob’s, but Katy says nothing. Katy slips out to the stable, where she thinks she will find Jacob. He is there, soaking wet, shivering in the hay, and clutching “the handle of a rake as if he might have need of a weapon” (212). Katy sits with Jacob in silence and then says what she thinks happened. She assumes that Nellie had a baby she didn’t want, and so she wouldn’t feed the baby. She asks Jacob if the baby came early because it is so much smaller than Mary was when she was born. She asks if the baby was born alive, and Jacob responds by imitating the mewing kitten like sound of the newborn, his way of answering yes. Katy gently asks if Jacob did to the newborn what he does to the newborn kittens, taking them to the creek and drowning them. He cries out, refusing to let her touch him. Her father enters the stable, and Katy tries to shield Jacob, saying, “He meant no harm, Father!” (214). Katy tells her father that she looked into Mary’s room and saw the dead baby, but she knows Jacob didn’t mean for it to die. She suddenly realizes that he meant to bring the baby to Mary’s room so that Mrs. Thatcher would feed and care for the rejected baby as her own, just as he had done with the rejected lamb on the farm. She apologizes to Jacob before he is taken away, and she tells her father not to “let them take his cap” (217).

After he is taken away Katy never sees Jacob again: “The court determined that he should be confined to the Asylum at the edge of town […] He was fourteen then. It was 1911. Nearly fifty years later the Asylum closed its doors” (217). After the asylum closes, Katy can find no records of Jacob Stoltz ever having been there.