The Boy on the Porch (2 page)

W
hen no one had come for the boy by nightfall, John and Marta fashioned a small bed beside their own. Marta offered the boy one of John's softest shirts to sleep in and set out a basin of warm water and soap for him to wash with. She tucked him into the bed, patted his hand, and hummed a few bars of an old, half-forgotten lullaby, softly, for she was embarrassed that John might hear her and think her foolish. As she stood to go, the boy reached up and tapped her arm five or six times, in that funny way he did, always lightly tapping on surfaces, on his own arm, on the dog, on the floor. His touch startled her, and she nearly wept, so grateful was she for the gesture.

After the child was asleep, John said, “This is too strange, Marta. Are you sure you have no idea who—”

“No! No idea. Maybe someone you worked for? Maybe a distant relative?”

“No, no. Maybe one of
your
relatives?”

“You know they have no idea where we live. My family never kept track of anybody.”

“But then, who?”

“And why
us
?”

“I thought they'd be back by evening, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Surely by tomorrow then.”

“Surely.”

A
t noon the next day, John said, “Marta, I don't know about all this. What are we supposed to do with the boy?”

Marta stood on the back porch, watching the child trail a stick through the dirt. The beagle followed close behind, sniffing at the ground.

“Marta? Should I take the boy with me when I go to town?”

“No. The people might come back.”

“What people?”

“The people who left the note. The ones who said they'd be back.”

“But they didn't say
when
they'd be back, did they? They didn't say that.”

After John left for town, Marta took the boy to the barn to see the new kittens and the mother goat and her three-month-old babes. The boy petted the animals and mimicked the kittens skittering and the goats leaping. The beagle watched from the side, intervening only when the boy got too close to the mother goat. When the boy sat in the straw, the kittens crawled over him and the young goats butted their heads under his arms, making the child laugh.

But it was a silent laugh, a laugh that you could see but not hear. It spread across his face and shook his body; it waggled his arms and legs. It was Marta who gave voice to the laugh, watching the boy. She laughed until her side ached; she laughed until the beagle crawled up into her lap and licked her face, as if to taste the laugh. And as she was laughing, Marta was hoping that the boy might stay a day or two.

During the twelve-mile stretch into town, John's mind took as many winding turns as the narrow road. He tried to ready himself for what he might hear in town and for what he should say. Maybe he should go straight to the sheriff's office and let him know about the boy. He didn't like the sheriff much. He was a bossy man, given to poking his finger in your face as if to warn you that he knew better about everything and you'd better not waste his time.

John's mind turned to Marta's face when she held the child and when she'd tucked him into bed and when she'd risen in the night to check on him. Maybe, John thought, he should first go to the general store and pick up the tone of things. Gossip found its way quickly to the general store in these small towns.

Out of nowhere, he thought of jelly beans and how he'd loved them as a child, how his father had taken him into town and let him buy a nickel's worth of jelly beans from the glass jar on the counter at the general store.

Maybe, John thought, he would bring home some jelly beans for the boy.

W
hen John returned home, the farmhouse was empty. He dashed out into the yard and called for Marta. He raced to the barn, calling her name. “Marta! Marta!”

He didn't know what made him so anxious. Maybe the people had come for the boy. He should have stayed home with Marta. What if there was a problem—but what sort of problem? What was the matter with him? He wasn't usually a worrier.

The barn was empty, except for kittens bouncing over hay bales. The goats and cows were in the fenced enclosures outdoors. And then he saw them, Marta and the boy, at the far end of the enclosure, lining up bottles and cans on the fence.

“John, there you are—what news? Oh, don't tell me. Please don't tell me. Listen to this—”

The boy raised his hands as if he were a music conductor, and then he began tapping at the bottles and cans with slender sticks. It wasn't random, reckless tapping: there was a distinct rhythm to it, slow and soft at first, rising to a crescendo, and then falling back to beautiful calm and then rising again. It sounded like waves at the ocean or the wind as it came across the fields and through the trees.

“I taught him that!” Marta said. “I mean, I was pretending to be a conductor and he put the cans up there and then—oh, I don't know—I was just tapping them—”

“You were pretending to be a conductor? You were tapping the cans?”

“Well, don't sound so
surprised
, John.”

“But how would you know how to be a—oh, never mind.”

“The boy was imitating my every move and then he took off with it. Listen to him.”

The boy continued, oblivious to everything but the sounds coming from the bottles and cans.

“And wait,” Marta said. “Watch what he does with the ladder.”

Farther down the fence was a ladder which she now dragged toward the boy. She handed the boy thicker sticks—ones John had used for stirring paint.

“I taught him this!” she said.

The boy rapped a rhythmic tune against the wooden ladder, on the sides and the rungs, a livelier, louder rhythm, full of life and joy, like a dozen dancers dancing on a wooden floor, or a dozen drummers drumming.

“You taught him that?” John asked.

“Only part—just the beginning—and he makes up the rest. He's very quick to learn, John.”

Next the boy's attention moved on to a bucket half full of rainwater. He dipped a stick into the bucket and swirled the water round and round.

“If it's bad news from town, don't tell me, John. Not yet.”

He rested a hand on her shoulder. “There is bad news and there is good news.”

“Don't tell me the bad news, John.”

“The bad news is—”

Marta covered her ears. “I said don't tell me—”

John moved her hands. “—that you've got cat poo on your skirt—and the good news is that there's no news in town.”

“No news? No news at all?”

“Well, now, I take that back. There was a little news. Vernie Gossem broke his leg, kicking his cow.”

“Serves him right then. Kicking his cow!”

“I brought something for the boy,” John said, removing a small brown bag from his jacket pocket and opening it for Marta to see its contents. He glanced away, embarrassed.

“John, don't you go filling this boy up with too many sweets.”

“You're one to talk. Didn't I see a batch of newly made fudge on the counter?”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Go ahead now, see if he likes those jelly beans.”

The boy—Jacob—seemed reluctant to take the jelly beans that John offered him, but at last he held a few in his hand and stared at them.

“Doesn't he know what they are?” Marta said.

John reached into the bag, selected a red jelly bean, and popped it into his own mouth. “Mm,” he said. “Mmm, mm.”

The boy chose a red jelly bean from his palm and placed it on his tongue. He tapped his lips twice and smiled.

T
hat night, after the boy had fallen asleep, Marta said, “I just can't imagine how anyone could drop off their child at a complete stranger's house—can you, John? What on earth could they have been thinking?”

“Maybe they had an emergency.”

“But why leave him
here
? It doesn't make a bit of sense.”

“He still hasn't spoken?”

“Not a word out of him. Do you think he's simply not
able
to speak?”

“Marta, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what to make of this boy.”

They'd both been puzzled by the boy's silence and equally puzzled by the boy's inclination to rap and tap on nearly every surface with sticks and spoons and whatever object was nearest. He tapped cups on saucers and a comb on a basin; he tapped book against book and stone against stone; and if there was no object at hand, there were always his hands and his feet patting and flicking and rapping and drumming.

“Maybe it is just what boys do,” Marta said. “Did you do that when you were young, John?”

“I don't think so, no. Maybe sometimes, maybe if I had a stick in my hand . . .” It was hard to remember himself as a boy. Sometimes it hardly seemed possible that he'd ever been a boy at all, but . . . at other times, he felt he was
still
a boy and he was surprised to be in this man's body, married and all, with a wife and responsibilities. How had that happened exactly?

“John, we should stop calling him ‘boy.' It isn't right. It makes him sound—I don't know—unimportant.”

At that, the beagle nudged John's leg, as if to say,
What about me? What about me
?

“We don't have a name for our dog, do we, Marta? And he's not unimportant.”

“He does so have a name: Beagle.”

“But he
is
a beagle, Marta.”

“I know, and that's why it's a good name for him.”

Then “Boy” should be a good enough thing to call a boy
, John thought, but he didn't say so because as soon as he thought it, he knew it wasn't true. “Boy” was not a good enough thing to call a boy.

“His name is Jacob, and that's what we should call him.”

“When do you think the people will come back for him?”

“Soon, don't you think? Surely, soon.”