The Boy on the Porch

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

  9

  John could not sleep. First, he was thinking that he should go to the sheriff’s office and report the boy’s arrival. But the sheriff would just make a mess of things, scaring the boy, scaring Marta. Maybe the people would come tomorrow. Maybe he should stop worrying. He was not a worrier. Why was he worrying so much?

  Then he thought about names. Your name is important. Your name makes a statement about you. It describes not only who you are but who you might be.

  Could he—John—have been named Franklin or Carter or Richmond or Conrad? No, too formal. Dwight or Thaddeus? No, no. Matthew, Mark, or Luke? No. Billy? Willy? Charlie? Sammy? No, he wasn’t one of those, either. He was John: solid, reliable, kind John.

  He wondered what Jacob was. The name was not unlike John’s. He was glad of that, although he couldn’t have said why.

  Marta was also awake. She was remembering earlier in the day when Jacob had found a piece of stiff wire fencing and was using it to tap against the stones and bottles and cans, and the sounds that emerged were so beautiful and clear and pure that it seemed as if the boy had been destined to be in this place at this time. Maybe the people would stay away a few more days.

  10

  The road at the end of their drive was not heavily traveled and only rarely did a vehicle turn onto their property, usually with a driver who was lost and seeking directions. John and Marta used to welcome these interruptions into the sameness of their days, but now they were wary of intrusions, alert to the sound of cars or trucks on the road, wondering if this next one would bring back “the people.”

  But on the fourth day of the child’s stay, John said, “This is not right, Marta. We must let someone know the boy is here.”

  Marta knew this. She knew the boy would have to leave. But so soon?

  “Marta, you don’t think he was kidnapped, do you?”

  “Kidnapped? But then why would he be dropped off here?”

  “Well, then, maybe the people who dropped him off got lost coming back to get him. Maybe they couldn’t find us again.”

  And so that day, as Marta and the boy made their way to the barn to feed the animals, John set off down the winding road to town once more.

  This time, in the general store, as John was paying for his purchases, he asked the owner, Shep Martin, if there’d been any talk of a lost boy.

  “What kind of lost boy would you be talking about?” Shep asked. Shep was a thin, bald-headed man with a potbelly that hung over his belt like a sack of feed. He didn’t like using two words where ten or twelve might do. “Would you be talking about a teenage kind of boy wandering around drunk and can’t find his stupid way home? Or would you be talking about a younger sort of squirt who ran away? Or—”

  “Younger.”

  “Can’t say as I’ve heard anybody talking about that, no, I can’t, except for maybe Vernie’s grandson, you know the one I mean? The redheaded one with the tattoos? Lord knows why a person would mess up his skin like that—”

  “Is Vernie’s grandson lost?”

  “Lost in the head, that’s what Vernie says. Is that the kind of lost boy you mean?”

  “No.”

  “Would you be looking for a lost boy? What do you need with a lost boy?”

  John scooped up his purchases and waved away the questions. “Naw, Shep, I thought I heard somebody mention it. I must’ve misunderstood. Maybe they were talking about—ha-ha—lost parents. You hear anything about any lost parents?”

  “Lost parents? Would you be looking for lost parents? Why ever—”

  “Naw, Shep, naw. Bye, now.”

  From there, John drove to the sheriff’s office but sat in his truck for ten minutes before mustering the will to enter. Inside, he scanned the Most Wanted posters and the handwritten notices tacked to the bulletin board.

  LOST: MY COW’S GONE OFF AGAIN, YOU KNOW THE ONE. YERNIE.

  NO DUMPING IN THE CHURCH DUMPSTER! WE MEAN IT!

  FOUND: TWO BLACK KITTENS BY THE CREEK, I’LL KEEP THEM IF YOU DON’T WANT THEM BACK AND I KNOW YOU DON’T OR YOU WOULDN’T HAYE DUMPED THEM THERE IN THE 1ST PLACE. DARLENE.

  Darlene, who also happened to be the sheriff’s receptionist, asked John what he was looking for.

  “Thought I heard tell of a lost boy,” John said.

  “You lose a boy or find a boy?”

  John had not expected such a direct question. “I saw a boy—”

  “Well, honey, haven’t we all? Haven’t we all?”

  John turned to leave. “Saw a boy the other day, looked lost, but if nobody’s looking for a lost boy, I must’ve been mistaken.”

  “Lots of boys look lost.”

  John was relieved to leave town. He’d made an honest effort, not the biggest effort, it was true, but he’d tried.

  11

  “Don’t tell me if it’s bad news,” Marta said. “Is it? Is it bad?”

  “It’s bad if you’re Vernie Gossem. Now he’s lost his cow.”

  “But—”

  “But it’s good if you’re hoping no one has reported a lost boy.”

  “No one has reported him missing?”

  “That’s right, and I also asked about lost parents, but there don’t seem to be any of those, either. Where’s the boy—Jacob—now?”

  “Up with the goats. I’ve just come down to get us a snack. John, we have something to show you—you are not going to believe your eyes!”

  Up in the barn, the boy was at one end, wielding a two-inch paintbrush. At his feet were two half-used cans of paint. On the wall he had painted a tall blue tree with a white swing. All around the tree were swirls of blue, like bubbles floating in the air.

  “I didn’t do any of it,” Marta said proudly. “He did it all.”

  “A blue tree?”

  12

  John and Marta owned two cows—received in payment for helping Vernie Gossem build an addition to his house—and a calf that was born about the same time as the baby goats. The elder cows were docile creatures, swinging their big heads slowly as they ate. The calf was still wobbly-legged, like the baby goats, and often the calf and goats would wobble and gambol around the pasture, bashing into each other clumsily.

  Like their beagle, the cows and goats, cats and kittens did not have names. Marta had thought this a little odd, but John had told her it felt silly to give them names. “You’d run out of names if you named every animal,” he had said.

  On the morning after John had been to town again, he and Marta heard the low mooing of a cow, but they knew instantly it was not their own, and besides, the sound was not coming from the barn or the pasture. It was drifting up from the road.

  “It’s probably Vernie’s wandering cow,” John said, putting on his boots.

  “If it is, you get that cow away from here, John. We don’t want nosy Vernie poking around.”

  From the curve halfway down the drive, John could see the fence and the road just beyond.

  “What the—?” The cow was near the road, as he’d suspected, but it wasn’t roaming loose. It was tied firmly to his fence. John looked up and down the road. He examined the cow: a sturdy one, well-fed, with a sleek coat and bright eyes. He’d seen Vernie’s cow and this wasn’t it.

  Two hours later, the cow was still there, and she was still there after lunch when John returned to retrieve her and lead her up to the barn.

  To Marta, he said, “Looks like we’ve got more company.”

  13

  Two years earlier, when John and Marta had found the beagle lying in the shade on their porch, they hadn’t thought much about how it came to be there. It had no collar, its ribs shone through its dusty coat, and they assumed the dog to be another stray from an unwanted litter. They didn’t expect the dog to stick around, but it did, day after day, week after week, until it seemed as if the dog had always been there, so easily did he fit in, following John from chore to chore, leaning against Marta’s ankles as she prep
ared meals, curling up at the foot of their bed protectively, and looking at them endearingly with those big, black eyes.

  When John and Marta had found the boy on the porch, they were curious, naturally, as to why he was there—and they hadn’t expected him to stay, not at first, but he did stay, day after day, until it seemed as if he belonged, running and smiling and laughing his silent laugh, tapping and patting on every surface as he made his music, and painting—with water, with paint, with mud—those swirly swirls and swings and trees.

  And now there was a new cow, and of course there is no comparison really between a child and a cow except that both, like the beagle, had found their way to John and Marta’s, whether by accident or intention, and John and Marta, in their quiet way, accepted these additions.

  The three foundlings—beagle, boy, and cow—formed an easy alliance, glomming on to each other like old pals. The beagle would lead the way across the pasture, and Jacob would climb up on the cow and ride along as the cow followed the dog to a shady spot. There, the boy might gather rocks and pile them against the fence and either rap at them with a stick or, if there was mud nearby, paint designs on them with his finger as brush. The beagle would circle, sniffing, and the cow would munch the grass or simply stand sleepily eyeing the boy and the dog.

  John and Marta might have expected—if they’d thought about it—that the boy would more likely adopt the young goats or calf as his companions, and although he did romp with them, too, he spent more time with the cow and the dog. One morning, John and Marta stood in the barn doorway, watching the boy, the beagle, and the cow, who were gathered a short distance away. John had just commented that he wished the boy would talk, that the silence was making John uneasy. He was worried that the boy might need something and be unable to communicate that need to them.

  Marta had been having the same worries, but now, watching the boy, the beagle, and the cow, she noticed a pattern in the way they interacted.

  “John—look at that. They’re having a conversation.”

  John was skeptical. “The beagle and the cow?”

  “The beagle, the cow, and the boy. That tapping and patting he’s been doing—he has his own language there, I think, and the cow and the dog understand it. And Beagle, the way he lifts his head up and down, as if he means to bark, and the cow—she, too, moves her head up and down and murmurs in response.”

  “Oh, Marta, I don’t think that can possibly be. That’s ridic—”

  “Watch.”

  And so they watched, and it was as Marta said. The boy tapped on the fence, the dog barked in silence, flapping his mouth open and closed, and the cow swung her head left and right, up and down, and murmured, Mmmm, mmmoo, mmm. The boy tapped the cow’s nose and the beagle’s nose, the dog flapped his jaws, and the cow murmured, Mmmm, mmmoo, mmm.

  “We have been so stupid!” Marta said. “All the while the boy has been ‘talking’ to us, and we never even knew it.”

  14

  As John and Marta paid closer attention to the boy’s tapping and patting, they quickly noticed patterns they had overlooked. There was a distinct rhythm to the way he greeted each of them:

  tap-TAP-TAP-tap

  and the way he greeted the dog

  tap-tap-TAP

  and the cow

  tap-tap-TAP-TAP

  and the bedtime tapping

  tap-TAP-TAP-tap-tap-tap

  and the after-meals tapping

  TAP-tap TAP-tap.

  “He’s talking all day long, John!”

  Gradually, they imitated his taps, so that they greeted him the way he greeted them, and they began and ended meals the way he did. The first few times, the boy reacted with his silent laugh, his shoulders bobbing up and down. But when he tapped more earnestly at other times, they did not know how to respond, and the boy seemed disappointed. They might guess what he was asking or saying, but they couldn’t merely repeat the same taps in reply.

  “If we teach the boy to read and write, Marta, that will solve everything, won’t it? He can write down what he wants to say.”

  Marta wasn’t completely convinced that the boy was unable to talk. She still wondered if he just was not ready to talk to them, or if he needed to recover from some horrible experience. Maybe he simply needed time. Always, too, at the back of her mind was the worry that the closer they came to know the boy and the more they loved him, the harder it would be to let him go.

  15

  On John’s weekly trips into town for supplies, he wondered if he would discover that someone had reported a missing boy or that people were inquiring about how to find John and Marta’s place. John could not understand why Jacob’s family had not returned yet.

  John had mentioned the boy and asked around, but no one had heard of the boy, or seemed the least bit interested, or even remembered from one week to the next that John had asked about him.

  How can that be? he wondered. How can there be a boy nobody knows about or cares about?

  One day on his visit to the general store, as John was buying more jelly beans, Shep said, “Your wife got a sudden sweet tooth?”

  “What? Oh, the candy. Ha-ha.”

  “Thought maybe you had a kid up there. Vernie says he thought he saw a kid riding a cow up at your place when he drove by t’other day.”

  “A kid—oh, sure, the one I mentioned. We’re watching a kid.”

  “That right?” Shep said.

  “Yep. Yep. Watching that kid for somebody, and that kid likes to ride cows. Imagine that.”

  On the far side of the store were shelves that carried used items. You might find bowls or pots or twine or rulers or bent spoons on those shelves. As John turned to go, he saw an old guitar on the floor, propped up against the shelves.

  “Are you playing that or selling it?” John asked.

  “The gitt-ur? That old thing? Naw, somebody left it here in trade for a couple of pots. You interested? I’ll trade it to you for that jacket you’re wearin’.”

  As John drove home, he could hardly contain himself.

  Wait till the boy sees this guitar! I can hardly wait to see that face of his!

  16

  When John presented the guitar to Jacob, the boy took a step backward, placing his hands against his chest. He looked from John to Marta to the guitar.

  “For you,” John said.

  The boy took another step backward.

  “It’s a present,” Marta said. “For you.”

  “It’s a guitar,” John added. “Have you never seen a guitar?”

  “It makes music,” Marta said. “Listen. Show him, John.”

  “Haven’t played one in a while,” John said. He fingered a few chords, strumming a simple tune.

  The boy reached out to touch the instrument.

  “You hold it like this,” John said, placing the guitar in the boy’s arms. “Here, try this chord. Your fingers like this, that’s right, and this hand, that’s right, and then you can switch to this . . .”

  And that was the only instruction he gave the boy, for once it was in his arms, the boy’s fingers moved along the strings, slowly and tentatively at first, and then with more eagerness, and then he sat with it for hours, exploring its possibilities, and by nightfall he was already making music. It sounded like nothing else Marta or John had heard. It was as if he were re-creating the sounds of the forest and the dawn and the mountains, all rolled together. The sounds moved John and Marta greatly. One minute they would be smiling and soon after they were close to tears. It was as if the boy had control of their minds and bodies.

  17

  Twice a week John drove farther afield to towns small and large, sifting through gossip and local papers. What he was discovering was that boys were as likely to go missing as cows were.

  “Georgia’s boy run off, but came home with his tail between his legs.”

  “My cow broke right through the new fence.”

  “Carl’s kid—that one with the hair—he was gone for four days and you kn
ow where they found him? In the hayloft over at Aggie’s place.”

  “My prize Blackie cow, you seen her, right? Gone for two days, comes home with a big smile on her face.”

  MISSING: 12-YEAR-OLD BOY, MEAN AS A STICK. YOU CAN KEEP HIM.

  MISSING: PRETTY BROWN COW, ANSWERS TO BETTY.

  FOUND: 12-YEAR-OLD BOY, MEAN AS A STICK. COME GET HIM.

  FOUND: BROWN COW, NOT SO PRETTY.

  All the boys and cows that were lost seemed to turn up again, though, unlike the boy at John and Marta’s, who had been found, but oddly, wasn’t lost.

  In all the time he had been at John and Marta’s, the boy hadn’t seemed afraid, didn’t seem to miss anyone, slept soundly, and ate heartily.

  “It’s like he was dropped right out of the sky,” John told Marta.

  18

  Although John was as impressed as Marta was with Jacob’s talents, he was beginning to worry that the boy wasn’t learning any “boy things,” and he said as much to Marta.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “What kind of boy things? He rides a cow, doesn’t he?”

  “True. That’s good, I guess.”

  “What else do you want him to do? Chop down a tree? Burn up the barn?”

  “I don’t know—get a little dirty, I guess.”

  “For heaven’s sake, John, he gets dirty. I ought to know. I’m the one trying to get the dirt out of his—and your—clothes.”

  Still, John was bothered. So one day he took Jacob and the beagle and two fishing rods with him to the creek. His plan was to show the boy how to dig for bait and bait a hook and catch a fish.

  Along the way, Jacob snatched a maple leaf and folded it into the shape of a bird. He picked up a stick and drummed it on tree trunks. He bobbed and jigged along the path with the beagle by his side. At a puddle, he stopped to trawl his fingers through the muck at the bottom and painted his arms with stripes of mud. At the edge of the creek he gathered a pile of stones and rocks and then threw them into the water with a rhythmic plip-plop-plop-plip.