The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry Page B

"I ' ll show you the animals," Peggy said.
    "Lambs!" Anna announced. She ran ahead.
    "Yes, there are new lambs. They always come at the end of winter. And there's a calf."
    I followed Peggy into the cool darkness of the barn. For a moment it seemed silent inside, but then I began to hear the stirring of animals: the thump of shifting feet, the swish of a tail, the deep breath of living creatures. A sudden snorting grumble nearby startled me, and Peggy laughed when I jumped in surprise. She pointed to a penned area near the barn door, and I saw the huge pig, with its whiskery face, inside.
    In another pen, lambs stood quietly next to their thick, silent mothers.
    One mother had two little ones; I pointed and whispered, "Twins," to Peggy. But she shook her head.
    "Sometimes they do have twins," she said. "But
these aren't. The small one? Its ma wouldn't take it when it was born. Sometimes that happens. The ma just turns away and wants nothing of it. And the lamb would die, too, with no ma to suckle it.
    "But Jacob took this one and put it with this ma, since she had milk for her own, and coaxed her till she would feed it with the other. And now she does. See?"
    As I watched, the smaller lamb nudged at the mother with its head and searched under her until it found milk.
    "It's runty because it was awhile till she took it for her own," Peggy explained, "but it will grow now."
    Mr. Stoltz appeared, wiping his hands on a rag, and he took Anna by the hand. "We'll go feed the hens," he said to his little girl, and she walked beside him happily off to the hen house on the other side of the barnyard.
    "Jacob's above," Mr. Stoltz called back to Peggy and me. "He's waiting for the girl."
    The girl?
I thought he must mean me. Peggy ' s face confirmed it. She was smiling at me. "You ' ll have to climb," she said.
    "I can climb. I climb with Austin all the time. We can go to the very top of the apple tree," I told Peggy.
    She pointed down to the end of the barn, where a ladder led up to a dark hay-fringed opening.
    "He's up there," she said.
    "Why is he waiting for me?"
    "He has something to give you," Peggy explained.
    The cows shifted where they stood, as I passed them.
    "Jacob?" I called from the bottom, though I knew he wouldn ' t answer. "It ' s Katy! I ' m coming up!"
    The ladder slanted and wasn ' t difficult to climb. Hay caught on my stockings and itched, and I knew it must be in my hair as well. It made me sneeze. I pulled myself up rung after rung until I reached the top and climbed into the loft. It was warm there, thick with bundled hay, and Jacob was standing by an opening in the wall so that light from the spring day was on him. Though he didn't look at me, I knew he knew I was there. He hadn't looked at me during breakfast, either, but I had felt that he followed every spoonful of oatmeal to my mouth. There was an awareness to Jacob's being.
    He was looking, from under his familiar cap, out at the meadow behind the barn, toward the creek.
    "Peggy and I went down to the creek with Anna and Pup," I told him. "It ' s beautiful today."
    He didn't turn.
    "Thank you for watering Jed and Dahlia."
    He stared down at the meadow.
"Peggy pointed out your family's horse, in the pasture. She said his name is Punch. That's a nice name for a horse." I thought perhaps to express my sympathy, because Peggy had also told me that Judy, the other horse, had died not long before. But it was hard to express something of that sort to a person who looked away.
    I waited. Finally I said, "Peggy told me you have something to give me."
    He rocked back and forth a little. I had seen him do it before, a motion that I knew by now meant that he was pleased. Finally, he hummed a little—that was no longer a surprise to me, either—and he pointed down into the hay near his own feet.
    I saw it then, and knelt down and picked up a small kitten the same color as the hay. Though small, it wasn't newborn; its eyes were wide open, dark brown, and when I