"Will Jacob be home?" I asked her.
"I expect so." She glanced at the sun, still low against the horizon. "He'll be helping my pa with the milking now. And by the time we get there, the milk will be in, and we'll have it still warm, on oatmeal. And honey with it, from the hives."
The thought made my cold toast unappetizing, and I threw the crust of it from the buggy to the side of the road, for birds and chipmunks to have.
"Do they know we ' re coming?"
"Yes. I telephoned."
"Do they mind, your bringing me?" I asked.
"Of course not," Peggy replied. "And when they find what a good girl you are, they may even want to keep you for their own!"
I glanced at her quickly because the thought made me a little fearful, but I could see she was teasing, and so I laughed as well.
I had not been inside the Stoltz farmhouse before. Peggy's mother greeted me warmly and hung my jacket on a wall peg.
"You're hungry, I expect," she said, and led me to the kitchen, where a wooden table was covered with a flowered cloth. The wood stove was hot, and kettles simmered atop it. The little girl—I remembered her name was Anna—sat in a high wooden chair and banged a spoon on the table. She smiled at me, then lowered her eyes, bashful.
The back door thumped open suddenly and Mr. Stoltz came in, with Jacob behind him. They smelled of barn, of hay and cows. Peggy's father set a bucket on the shelf beside the stove. Then he nodded at me and said, "Miss." He began to wash his hands, pumping the water with the handle at the sink. "Wash, boy," he said, and Jacob joined him.
It surprised me that Jacob did not look at me, or nod, or smile. I had thought that we were friends, in an odd but special way. Again and again I had stood with him in the stable, stroking the horses massive heads side by side. We had never talked. Indeed, I had never heard Jacob speak. But we had made sounds together—I thought of it as our special kind of singing, there in the stable—and sometimes I had walked beside him and his dog for a way, through the alley behind our house, when he left to roam off to other places that I did not know about.
But Jacob did not look at me.
We sat around the table on sturdy wooden chairs. "Cap," Mr. Stoltz said, looking at his son meaningfully. Jacob turned his face away and pretended not to hear..
"Remove your cap, boy." When he repeated it, his tone was stern. Reluctantly Jacob grabbed the cap from his own head, exposing uncombed, curly hair. He held the cap crumpled in his lap.
Then we bowed our heads while Peggy's father asked the blessing. Even little Anna bowed her head, but I saw her peeking.
Mrs. Stoltz served us oatmeal and honey, as Peggy had promised. The cream was thick and golden, still warm from the cow.
"Did you milk the cow, Jacob?" I asked, feeling shy.
"Sure, Jake milks," Mr. Stoltz said.
To my surprise, Jacob began to make a rhythmic sound: not the shoooda, shoooda of the millstone, not the song of the horses, but a psssss, psssss that he repeated again and again. Anna giggled.
"Enough, boy," his father said sternly. Then to me he explained, "That d be the sound of the milk into the pail."
Peggy helped her mother wash the dishes, after, but they wouldn't let me, though I offered. Instead I played at the table with Anna. I folded and rolled the napkins into dolls, and we walked them around and made them say hello and goodbye to each other, with bows and curtsies that made the little girl laugh. She climbed down from her chair after a moment, ran off into another room, and came back carrying her own doll to show me. It was sewn of rags, with hair made from yarn and two buttons on it for eyes. I could tell it had been loved. Parts were worn and frayed from holding and, even as she showed me, Anna put her thumb into her mouth and began to stroke the doll in the way little ones do when they are tired. Then she giggled again and set the doll aside in her father's chair.
Mr. Stoltz and Jacob, with his cap firmly back in place, had gone back outside. "We ' ll water your horses," Mr. Stoltz had said, and I was glad that Jacob would be caring for Jed and Dahlia, who knew him well by now.
Peggy showed me around the little house: the parlor, with its stiff chairs and worn rug. Back home, in town, we used our parlor every night, sitting there to read, or sometimes Mother played the piano. Gram played Patience in the parlor, and the fire crackled in the fireplace on chilly nights. But this room was cold and unused. The kitchen was the warmth of the Stoltz farmhouse.
Jacob slept in a tiny room behind the kitchen, and upstairs were two cold bedrooms, one that Peggy and Nellie had shared—it was Anna ' s now—and the other where their parents slept. I shivered and Peggy laughed. "It ' s spring now," she pointed out. "In winter it ' s really cold! But see? The comforters are stuffed with down. They're warm enough."
I felt the softness of the down-filled bedding. The rooms were dark, their walls bare of decoration, and the floors were splintery wide boards. No rugs; no flowered wallpaper; no silver-backed brush and comb.
"Where is the bathroom?" I whispered.
Peggy pointed through the window to the privy behind the house.
"Peg," her mother said as we passed through the kitchen on our way outdoors, "Floyd Lehman asked when you was to be at home. You want I should tell him? There's a telephone at the Fosters now, and they d call him to it."
Peggy blushed and said no. It was the first I knew that she had an admirer.
When we went outdoors, the spring air was warmer now than the early morning had been. Birds sang, and flowers were coming into bud, curled pink and white. A chipmunk ran across a stone wall and jerked its tail before disappearing into a chink. Anna trotted behind us as Peggy walked with me down to see the creek.
The water was deep. It moved past, swirling and foaming lazily around the rocks. Peggy held tight to Anna's hand as the little girl leaned forward curiously to see. We threw in some pebbles and watched the circles they made. A familiar-looking dog, brown with a white face, appeared, running toward us through some nearby tall grass, and Peggy stroked its head and spoke to it.
"It's Jacob s dog," she said, but I knew it already. The white-faced dog with floppy ears always sat by our stable and waited when Jacob was there, and then followed him when he left.
"He raised it from a puppy," Peggy explained. "Its mother died when she had a litter, and all the pups died but this one. We didn't even know for a long time. Jacob hid it in the barn and fed it cow's milk, dipping a rag in so the puppy could suck. Pa said he probably had to do it ten times a day, to keep the pup alive."