The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry Page A

Peggy read to herself while Mother napped. Once each week we went to the library, the two of us, and sometimes, if she promised to behave, Jessie came along.
    Early one Friday evening the telephone rang, and Father was called away to the hospital. Mother sighed, set her knitting down, and took up the book. But her voice was different, and she didn't act the parts like Father did, using comical voices. Even she said so.
    "I just can't do it as well,"Mother said regretfully. "I hope he gets back early."
    But Father was gone all night, and in the early morning came in smelling foul and went right upstairs for a bath. There had been a terrible fire at Schuyler's Mill.
    "Some of the men are laying blame on the Stoltz boy," I heard Father tell Mother in their bedroom as he dressed. "Peggy's brother. He hangs about the mill often; he loves it there. And the men make fun of him because of his affliction. Now they're looking for someone to blame."
    Mother's voice sounded very worried. "Might it be true?" I heard her ask. "Is he responsible? Oh, that would be terrible news to give Peggy."
    "No, no. One of the late workers lighted a cigar
and the dust burst into flame like an explosion. People saw the whole thing. The Stoltz boy wasn't even there."
    The entire mill was gone, they had told him, just the walls left standing, and the grindstone lying in the rubble. Men had come from everywhere to fight the fire and some of them were burned.
    Father said at breakfast he hoped they would live but wasn't sure. He and other doctors had worked all that night. But when I asked him to tell me what it was like, and what the doctors did, both Mother and Peggy shushed me.
    "It's bad for the baby to talk about such things," Peggy explained, taking me aside later that morning, when she was ironing. "It would upset your mama, and then the baby will be damaged."
    "I don't see how. The baby's very cozy inside. It floats, Father told me, and swims."
    "Babies can be marked," Peggy said in a serious voice. "I heard of a woman who was frightened by a runaway horse, and her baby was born with a mane and tail."
    "Peggy!" I sputtered with laughter. "I
know
that can't be true! You didn't really see it, did you?"
    "Well, no, but I heard."
    "Someone was fooling you."
    Peggy thought about it and smiled, finally. "Maybe," she admitted. "But it
is
true that you mustn't upset a mother-to-be. You know the boy
who delivers the groceries from the market?"
    "Yes." It was a boy from my school, actually, a sixth-grader named Edward, who brought the groceries in his wagon. My mother always gave him a nickel at the back door.
    "He was marked on his face when his mother was carrying him. She likely saw something hideous and put her hand to her face in just that place."
    Edward had a pale pink stain across his chin and cheek. "Father calls it a birthmark," I told Peggy.
    "You see?"
    I didn't, exactly, and resolved to ask Father more about it when we were alone together.
    Peggy set the iron back on the stove to reheat. She folded the heavy sheet she d been ironing, set it aside, and took another, damp and rolled, from the basket. The moisture and heat felt good in the kitchen with the cold weather outdoors.
    "Peg? Is
touched
the same as marked?"
    "Touched?" She looked at me, puzzled, as she laid the sheet out on the board.
    "Jacob. You said he was touched."
    The hot iron sizzled when she laid it on the sheet, and she moved it so that it wouldn't scorch.
    Peggy chuckled. She looked fond. Always when she spoke of her brother, she got that fond look. "My mother says 'touched by the Lord,' and I think it's true.
    "My pa, though, he don't think that," she confided. "He wishes he had him a boy who could take on the farm one day. Jacob can't ever."
    "But you said he's good with animals." I had seen it, too, watching him with our own horses—for he had come many evenings now, and I had seen him there, in the stable—but I didn't talk to Peggy about Jacob's visits. It was not