Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) (12 page)

Joe stood up and went in. He looked just the way Daddy used to look when he was absolutely furious. "It's wonderful cheese!" he said. "And he's a wonderful old man! I'm going to learn how to make cheese and chains and everything and get me a house and live
just like him.
"

He went tramping up the stairs.

"Well!" Daddy said.

The summer world grew and swelled and ripened. Weeds along the edges of the fields and in the rail-fence corners were up to Marly's waist. By the Fourth of July they were beginning to go brown, and Daddy warned Joe and Marly not to toss their sparkler wires too far with the wires hot. At the celebration in town, ice cream dripped before you could get your cone licked even once around.
That
was really summer.

"Summer," Mr. Chris said that night after the fireworks were over and they were all having homemade ice cream on his front porch, "is fruit time mostly, just the way spring is mostly flower time." Marly could see that it was true. For the rest of the summer it seemed to get truer and truer. Every flower that had bloomed bore some kind of seed or fruit, and it was a surprise to see how the different ones turned out. For instance, the greeny-looking clintonia flower bells became beautiful blue berries, but there were so few of those you could search the whole woods and not find enough to string a bracelet. Rose hips were everywhere, yellow and red, and you could make strings of beads clear to your toes without stirring off the porch. Lily of the valley bore clusters of brightest red; but the false lily of the valley in the woods had berries that were speckled with brown. Solomon's seal had dark blue berries in a neat row where the flowers had hung under the leaves. It was as if all its little bells had run away and forgotten their clappers. The large pale flowers of the mayapple had dropped their petals, and their middles swelled bigger and bigger; Chrissie said she'd good price for a basket to make preserves 9 but it hard to find so much as a pintful on account of the animals liking them so well.

Where trillium had spread its wide white petals, there were now long beads of berries, some red and some black. Twisted-stalk had baubles, little transparent red berries you could see into. Mr. Chris said Dutchman's-breeches had such bad fruit for cows to eat that their summer name was "little blue staggers."

Joe and Marly did so much berrying, what with strawberries and then red raspberries and then blackberries, that Joe said he was absolutely berried-out. But they kept going. Fritz showed them such special blackberry patches that they could fill a quart without taking a single step, and each berry was the size of Mr. Chris's thumb. Every time, too, there was apt to be pie afterwards. And with blueberries or huckleberries, there might be pie and then muffins for breakfast besides and maybe pudding for lunch.

For a while chokecherries were thick on the trees along the lumber roads that had been a mist of white blooms earlier. They meant jelly. So did elderberries, later.

Eat—eat—eat! Not only the wild things but all the things in Daddy's garden got ready for eating about the same time, until Mother said she felt food running out of her ears. She canned and canned and juiced and juiced and sent lots of things to a freezer so they could be used on weekends during winter visits. "I feel like Joseph in Egypt getting ready for the lean years during the fat years," she said.

In August Marly found the oddest berry she had ever seen. Mr. Chris had warned her "never to eat strangers," so she carried a big spray of these to ask him about. Each berry sat on a cunning scarlet flower, which was left behind when the berry was picked away.

"Pokeberries," Mr. Chris said. "Are
they
ready already? We always made ink out of them for school."

He said she could taste them if she wanted to. And of course she did—once. But she'd as soon drink ink for breakfast.

When Mother saw them, she laughed and said, "Grandma called them inkberries. She was always sorry to see them starting to ripen. They were a sign it was almost time for us to go home again, back to school."

Marly gathered a whole lot of them and made a little dish of ink. Mother said she'd never in her life seen such a big fuss over such a little juice. A whole summer of jellying and juicing, she said, hadn't made so much mess in the kitchen. Purple stains were absolutely everywhere, on the ceiling and even in drawers that had been a little open. But there was enough in the dish, finally, to write almost a half-page of a letter to Carol. "Imagine—a
pokeberry
letter!" Marly said. "That's as nice as strawberry bouquets."

The carpets of wintergreen began to show red berries, and Mr. Chris said they'd not stop growing all winter long. "Lost people have been known to brush away the snow and eat those berries to save their lives," he said.

The thick green leaves tasted just like chewing gum. Chrissie served for dessert one night what she said was the "best berry-combination in the whole world"—wintergreen berries and blueberries. Marly didn't say so, but raspberries and currants seemed better to her.

The creatures in the drying ponds sang louder every night; the creatures in the grass and in the fields sang louder every day! Mr. Chris said they knew winter was coming soon, and they had to get all the noise out of their systems.

Then a few leaves drifted down. Winged seeds lay beneath the tulip trees, and all along the roads milkweed pods began to spill white silky threads.

The days seemed to go faster and faster. Mr. Chris looked sad. One night he looked up at the sky and said in the saddest voice Marly had ever heard from him, "When the moon comes full again, there'll be a killing frost."

Chrissie looked sad, too. "I wish you could see the leaves turn, Lee," she said again and again. "After you go, I won't be able to stand looking in this direction at night. It's been so good to have somebody in this house, watching for the light in the evening just the way I did when your grandma was here."

Three weeks—then two weeks until time for school. It seemed odd to Marly how sudden it seemed after the whole summer. Summer looked like forever in front of you, and now it was almost gone. She hated the thought of leaving Maple Hill so much that she even hated the boxes Mother started to pack in. But Joe whistled as he brought them down. He didn't seem to care much about anything, Marly thought.

One day when she was coming downstairs she heard Daddy say something mysterious and important. She could tell from the sound of his voice how important it was. "Well, we can't go on postponing it any longer, can we?
We've got to decide now!
" he said.

"I expect Marly would be glad," Mother said. "But I don't know about Joe."

"I didn't even think we could get in and out," Daddy said. "But Chris says with a good load of that gravel on the low place, we wouldn't have a bit of trouble. The county keeps the roads clear for the school bus."

Marly felt herself beginning to tremble, because she was beginning to know what they were talking about. "Every objection I think of, Chris figures a way out," Daddy went on. "They really do want us to stay."

Stay! Here? At Maple Hill?
All winter?
Marly was listening so hard that her ears felt like a donkey's, on either side. Mother was clattering the skillet, and it was hard to hear every word she said.

"...as tight as ever, isn't it? After all, Grandma stayed here all the year round as far back as I can remember—and before. And as Chris says, if we got the heat in ... It's not the house that worries me, Dale."

"I know." Marly heard the sadness in Daddy's voice. "It's not fair for the children. If it wasn't for school..."

"Of course, I don't see anything wrong with country schools myself. The children get lots more attention than they do in those crowded city schools now. It's only that Joe was so pleased about being in such a big school, so new and everything, and he likes his crowd. And he wanted to get a horn and play in the band."

Marly hardly heard past the words "country schools." She and Joe had seen the little Maple Mountain school. It looked just like a church, with a funny bell tower. It even had a graveyard behind it, on a low hill, with the stones overgrown and tumbling. They traced interesting names on some of them, like Mehitable and Josephus, and even gruesome verses about dying. When they looked through the dusty windows of the schoolhouse, they laughed and laughed. There were rows of pictures still pinned to the walls, birds and pussy willows and tulips that the children had colored in the spring. And there was the hugest, roundest stove they ever saw in all their lives. Six rows of desks went from a little tiny row to a great big row. Joe said it looked like a school for "the six bears"—from the little bears to the big bears.

"Imagine having to go to a school like that!" he said.

What was Joe going to think? She couldn't wait to tell him and find out. She crept upstairs again and into Joe's room, but he was still asleep. He looked tall when he was lying down, especially because he spread himself every direction. And once he was spread on the mattress, he didn't move; Daddy said he slept like a stone and a log rolled together.

"Joe!" she said.

He growled and turned over and pulled the covers nearly over his head.

She sat on the edge of the bed. It'd be fun to tease him about that funny school, she thought. So she leaned down close to his ear and said: "Joe-guess what! We're not ever going back to Pittsburgh, we're going to stay right here at Maple Hill
all winter long!
"

"
What?
" He sat up so fast she almost fell off the edge of the bed. You'd have thought he hadn't been asleep for a week.

"Yes—I just now heard Mother and Daddy talking. He said it's a good enough house to stay in all winter, and Mr. Chris says we can get in and out, and Mother says the school bus comes by, and we get to go to that funny little old school by the graveyard!" Her words came tumbling over each other, and it came to Marly as she said them that they weren't strictly true, at least not yet. But then she had never yet known something Daddy wanted not to be what Mother wanted, too. And anybody could tell from the way he talked that he wanted to stay at Maple Hill.

Joe looked absolutely horrified. "
That school?
" She could see on his face the thought of the beautiful school where he would go in Pittsburgh. A solid block of buildings with rooms and rooms and a gymnasium and everything, with policemen to help all the children across the streets.

"I don't believe it," he said, and got out of bed and started for the door.

"Joe—" Marly hurried after him. "Mother and Daddy were talking, see. And I don't think it's all settled, but Daddy—"

"I knew it wasn't so," Joe said. "You always get things wrong." He stood and looked at her angrily. "I'll bet you made the whole thing up. Why, we started packing yesterday."

"I heard them," she said. "Mother said she didn't see anything wrong with country schools. I heard her—"

"Honest?"

"Honest. Daddy said it wouldn't be fair for us, and she said she didn't see anything wrong—"

"Imagine!" Joe interrupted her as if he couldn't stand to hear another word. "That school! All those little kids right in the same room. Why, I wouldn't go to that school if there wasn't another school in the whole world! Why—" He didn't seem able to find even the words to say how awful the whole idea was. He turned and opened the door, but Marly caught his arm.

"Joe." Marly made her face go as long and solemn as she could. "I know how Mother feels. You see, Daddy's better here, isn't he?"

For a minute Joe stood looking at her. She saw his face get afraid, just the way it used to get when Daddy was cross. Once Daddy even reached out and slapped Joe's face, hard, and Mother hurried and took hold of Daddy's arm and said, "Don't you dare!" Joe looked just the same now as he had then.

"The other day when Mother and I were in the garden," Marly said, "Daddy was at the other end of the row. And Mother said, 'Isn't it wonderful how much better Daddy is at Maple Hill?' He was laughing and talking and telling stories and singing the whole time, all the time it took to pick the last of the beans and pull all those carrots and beets."

While she talked, Joe walked slowly back to his bed. He lay down and pulled the covers up again. The huge movie theaters, the museums, the concerts, the science exhibits. She knew all the things Joe loved about the city. He liked the bridges and the hills and even the steel mills. He liked noise and people and policemen. He had his crowd, and they went all kinds of places together. Cities were lots better for boys, she thought, even boys who liked to explore.

"Don't you like Maple Hill, Joe?" she asked. "Not a bit?"

"Sure I do." His voice sounded lost and little, deep in the covers. "But..." His face came out. "Why, I was going to get that horn and play in the band and everything."

"Joe, maybe we're not really going to stay here," she said. "You just tell Daddy how you feel. They were just saying we'd have to decide."

He sat up again. "How do you mean, Marly? I thought you meant it was all settled."

"They were just talking, see, and Daddy said we had to decide."

He threw the covers off so hard they went all over the floor. "Well, I'm going down and find out," he said. "First you say one thing, and then you say the other. If you don't
know
something, you just ought to shut up about it." He was on the stairs already. "I'm going down and find out," he said again.

Marly heard Daddy say, "Find out what?"

Oh, dear,
she thought. Why did she get excited and make out that things were so when they weren't? At least not yet. She was always saying things were settled, and then sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren't. She followed Joe down the stairs, wishing she hadn't said a single word.

"Are we going to stay here all winter and have to go to that funny old school, like Marly says?" Joe demanded.

Mother turned from the stove. "Did Marly say that?" she asked. "How in the world did she get hold of that idea?"