It was the most popular dance. Jessie and I had been practicing it in my room, and we made so much noise that Mother said she was afraid the parlor ceiling would fall down. I thought it served Paul Bishop right to be at a school where there would be no Turkey Trot. Now there would be no girl for him to dance it with, and no Nellie, either, to kiss in the barn and sneer at after.
I wanted a birthday party. Last year, on my eighth birthday, I had been in bed with chicken pox and had opened my gifts in my bedroom, stopping now and then to scratch even though Father kept telling me not to.
Now, about to be nine, looking through the things stored in the attic, I found our pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, the donkey printed on a big oilcloth and punctured with pinholes from other parties. I brought it downstairs and showed Peggy. She had never seen one before.
"You pin it to the wall," I explained, "and then each child has a blindfold on, one after another, and they are spun around in a circle, and then they go to the donkey all blinded, holding a tail, and try to pin it in the right place."
Peggy looked dubiously at the faded donkey I had laid out on the dining room table.
"See how there are pinholes in wrong places? Look! There's a hole in his ear! Jessie Wood did that at my seventh birthday. Then she cried because she didn't win the prize."
"What prize?"
It was surprising to me that Peg knew so little about birthday parties. "The one who gets closest to the tail place gets a prize. At my last party, the one before the chicken pox, the prizes were handkerchiefs for the boys and thimbles for the girls.
"And we do a spider web! Mother will wind string all around, one for each child, and it's like a spider web. You follow your string and at the end you find a surprise! Usually it's just a sweet."
"My land. What else?"
"Oh, games, of course. London Bridge, and Farmer in the Dell. We can do those out in the backyard. And Naomi will make a cake, and there will be ice cream."
Peggy folded the donkey oilcloth carefully and put it in the bottom drawer of the buffet, where the tablecloths were. "It's time to fetch Mary down from her nap," she said.
"Peggy?"
"What?"
"I want to invite Jacob to my birthday party."
She looked at me, astonished. "Jacob?"
At that moment my kitten—full-grown now, a good-sized, good-natured cat—hopped down from the chair where he'd been sleeping. He strolled through the room and rubbed himself against my shoe. "He gave Goldy to me," I reminded Peggy.
"Jacob don't go to parties," Peggy said. "He never."
I picked up Goldy, and he hung dangling in my arms like a doll with floppy arms and legs. I listened to his purr. I knew Peggy was right, that it wouldn't do, that Jacob wouldn't understand a party, that the other children would be uneasy if he came.
I told him, though, that I had wanted him to come.
"I'm going to have a birthday party next week, Jacob," I said, when I saw him next. "I wanted to invite you, but Mother said it had to be just children from my class at school.
"I'll be nine," I added.
I wasn't sure that he was even listening, or, if he was listening, whether he understood. He was holding Goldy on his lap, and he stroked the cat's neck with one finger and imitated the purr. We sat side by side on stacked hay in the stable.
"Anyway, I wanted to give you these." I reached into my pocket and pulled out the two big cat's-eye marbles I had brought him. They were both deep brown, flecked with gold and black. I had chosen them from the bag of marbles that Mother had bought at Whittaker's Dry Goods for party prizes and favors. Jacob took them from me and they clicked together in his hand.
He imitated the click with his tongue against his teeth, and smiled in that odd way he had, with his eyes looking someplace else. The horses shifted in their stalls. Goldy yawned and stretched. Outside, a wind came up, and I could hear dead leaves whisper as they broke loose and fell from the branches of the big ash tree in the yard. Our back door opened, and from the kitchen Peggy called me to come in. Jacob looked up at the sound of her voice, and his knees jiggled, but he stayed silent.
15. OCTOBER 1911
I had a new white lawn dress and a huge hair ribbon, and Naomi had made me a cake with buttercream frosting. It was warm enough that Saturday afternoon that Father moved the kitchen table to the backyard and we took the chairs outdoors, too, and set them around the table. Then Mother tied a pink bow on the back of my chair, for my birthday. She laid the table with a yellow cloth and we used my favorite plates, white ones with pink flowers.
I helped to wrap the prizes and watched while Father nailed the oilcloth donkey to the side of the stable. The sun was shining and there were still some chrysanthemums in bloom. Only one thing was wrong. Peggy wasn't there.
Peggy had lived with us now for more than a year, and it felt as if she was part of the family. Mother joked that when Mary began to talk, she would probably call Peggy "Mama."
But today, on my birthday, it was Mother and Naomi who tended Mary, as they had for the past two days. Peggy had been called home for an emergency. Our telephone had rung late two nights before, when I was already in bed, and I heard Father go up to the third floor to get Peggy. Then, after a quick flurry of gathering her things, Father hitched up the horses and took her home.
"She'll be back soon," Mother had reassured me in the morning as I ate my breakfast. The house seemed subdued without Peggy there; she usually bustled about, entertaining Mary, helping me get my things for school, talking to Mother about the plans for the day.
"Will she be here for my party?"
Mother frowned. "I don't think so, Katy. I expect she'll be gone about a week. There's illness in her family, and you know it always takes awhile to heal."
I remembered my own chicken pox and agreed. It takes forever.
"Who is ill?"
"I don't know," my mother said.
I guessed that it was Peg's mother who was ill, and I worried for their family because the little girl, Anna, needed a mother. Even with Nellie there, and Peggy, Anna would be frightened if her mother was ill.
I didn't believe it could be Mr. Stoltz, that big strong man who seemed as if nothing could fell him. And I knew it wasn't Jacob. I had seen Jacob just the night before, in our usual place.
He had shown me, pulling them from his pocket, that he carried the two marbles with him. It was odd how Jacob never looked at me—his eyes were always to the side, or his face turned away, and he couldn't, or didn't, ever speak—but he communicated in his own ways. Looking sideways toward the horses, he held out his hand and showed me the marbles; he made the small clicking sound again and nodded his head a little.