I looked down at the dog. It was sitting, now, in the grass beside Anna. Its tail wagged and it looked back at me with huge dark eyes.
"Does it have a name?"
Peggy chuckled. "Jacob don't name things," she said. "We all just call it Pup."
"Good Pup," Anna said solemnly, and patted the dog's back.
"Go find Jake!" Peggy said to the dog, and immediately it rose and trotted toward the barn. We followed. "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 stroked its soft golden fur, it began to purr.
Jacob rocked and rocked with pleasure.
"Oh, Jacob, thank you!" I said to him. "You knew I wanted a kitten, didn't you? Peggy must have told you." He looked away, back out toward the meadow, but his face was flushed with embarrassed excitement.
"Peggy!" I called down from the loft into the barn where she waited. "Jacob gave me a kitten!"
She came halfway up the ladder. "I know," she said. "He's pleased, doing it.
"Jacob?" she called gently to her brother. "You made Katy very happy."
"Thank you, Jacob," I said again. Then I lifted the kitten away from where it was cuddled against me, pulling its tiny claws loose from my pinafore. I leaned down and handed it to Peggy so that I could use both my hands on the ladder. At the bottom, I took it back from her and held it against me, feeling it purr.
"It's prettier than most," Peggy said, looking carefully at it. "He must have chose it for that.
"You'll have to give it a name," she said. "Jake don't, but you should."
I nodded. "But not yet. The right name will come."
At the midday meal (at home we called it Sunday dinner) there was chicken roasted so the skin was crisp, all manner of vegetables from the farm, and thick bread. We sat at the same table and bowed our heads again for the blessing, and when I peeked down to my hands in my lap, I could see the kitten sleeping there. Peggy had pinned up the corners of my pinafore to make a kind of carrying sack, and my kitten had been there the entire morning.
The telephone rang several times, and each time the whole family jumped; it was new to them, and they weren't used to it yet, and had to count the rings. Their ring was four-two, Peggy explained. That meant four long rings and two short, and they should answer.