The Silent Boy Read Online Free Page A

heard in summer in the town park. Austin and Jessie and I would run about the park on those summer evenings, chasing fireflies and watching the young women in their pretty dresses flirt with the boys. In the background was the music, with bright brass instruments leading the way, but up close, as we played near the bandstand and listened, we could hear the little ones—the flutes and even sometimes a tiny triangle held in the air for a moment to be touched—each putting in its sound.
    Here in the mill, it was the great whooshing sound of the wheel and the splash and thunder of water, over everything. The crackle and swish of poured grain. Then the creak and grind of the wooden gears, and the deep smooth sound of the stone. Finally there were the small, almost silent sounds of the finished flour dropping into bags, and the soft thud of the bags being stacked.
    I was sorry when Father led us into the office and closed the door against the sound. But I sat where he directed me and was still. Jacob set the bag down where Father pointed and in a minute the man with the bandaged hand came in, holding his hat in front of him, and nodded. "Doctor," he said, as the others had.
    I didn't notice Jacob slip away. When Father opened his bag, my mind went there, as it always did, to his shiny tools and the bottles with their
special smells. He had once given me a little bag so that I could doctor my dolls, and it was filled with small things, imitations, not real, and though I played with it because I knew he wished me to, I had no affection for the sugar pills or the dull scissors. I loved only the smells and the sharpness and the real importance of the tools my father used for healing.
    I watched carefully as he unwrapped the man's thickly bandaged hand. "Good," he said. "You've kept it clean. There's no infection.
    "Look, Katy," he told me, and nodded when I left my chair and came close, though the man with the wound seemed surprised.
    The stitching thread was black against the man's pale skin. His other hand was ruddy and dark, like all workingmen's hands, but the bandage had kept the light and labor from the wounded one and made it pale. I could see where the jagged cut, shaped like a drawing of a lightning bolt, zigzagged across his palm, ending in the soft flesh at the base of his thumb.
    "Move your fingers, Sturges," my father said, and when the man did, he nodded.
    "Good. Now the thumb." While I watched, the large thumb bent and straightened. "Any pain?"
    "Stiff is all," the man said.
    "And you can feel? Try this against your fingertips. Do you make it out as chain and not a piece
of wood or maybe rope?" Father handed him his watch chain and the man rolled it back and forth, and nodded. "Gold chain," he said, and grinned.
    "You're a lucky man, Sturges. No real damage. Now you won't mind if I show my daughter? She wants to be a doctor."
    I moved closer and Father showed me, running his own thumb across the pattern of dark stitches.
    "It was the palmar fascia that protected him from worse injury," Father said. "It's very thick and strong tissue here. Below it are the nerves and muscles, and if he had sliced into those, we d have had to haul him into town and do some pretty complicated surgery."
    "Wouldn't have gone," the man muttered.
    "You'd ve gone or lost your hand, Sturges," Father said, laughing. He began rubbing the area of the stitches with gauze soaked from a bottle in his bag. The smell was strong and medicinal, but the liquid had no color and it dried quickly. Then Father lifted one of the stitches with a pincer in one hand, snipped it with sharp scissors in his other, pulled it through, and laid the snipped thread on a piece of gauze set out on the desk. It didn't seem to hurt the man at all. I counted as Father did it again and again.
    "Sixteen," I announced, when he was done.
    With the black stitches gone, I could see only a jagged pink line on the man's palm, and some tiny
dots where the stitches had been. It