Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) (4 page)

"I knew how everything was going to look," Marly said. It was really true. "Even if you hadn't told me, I'd have known which was your room and which was John's and which was Grandma's. But your window is the best. It looks
out
the most."

"It faces the valley, not the hill. I always liked that," Mother said. "This should be your room, Marly, because it was mine." She came and stood by the window, and never in her whole life had Marly ever loved her quite as much as at that moment. "Sometimes I was a little lonely up here," Mother said. "It's good you'll have Joe to explore with. John never seemed to want me along, and there were lots of boys for him to go with. Hunting and fishing, things like that."

"Joe says I'm too slow. He won't take me either," Marly said. "But I don't care. Sometimes you can go with me, and I'm not a bit afraid to go alone."

Out of the window were wide fields with wonderful rail fences just like in the pictures of Lincoln splitting rails. There were sudden gullies, too, where you knew streams would flow when the snow melted, and in every direction were fringes of brown and green. The woods even came tumbling into the fields where new trees were growing.

"I tried going alone," Mother said, "but I never really liked it. The minute I got into the woods it felt lonely, and I got scared and hurried back to Grandma." She put her hand on Marly's shoulder in a nice friendly way. "I'll try not to be too busy, but a farmer's wife has an awful lot to do." She leaned close to the window and rubbed some of the dust off to see better. "You know, I've never seen it like this before—with snow on it and the leaves gone. It's lovely, isn't it? You see the shapes of things." Her breath made the glass misty, and so did Marly's, so everything had a kind of mysterious fog around it. "If I could draw—" Mother said.

Marly remembered some of the pictures at home and Mother saying, "Yes, I used to draw a lot. But there doesn't seem to be time anymore."

"You draw real good pictures, Mother," she said.

Mother laughed and shook her head. "I was just thinking, if I drew what's out of the window now, it'd have to be with pen and ink. In the summer you have to have great big brushes full of green. When we come back in June, you'll see."

Marly hardly heard the last of it. She had opened a dresser drawer—and there was a whole family of wonderful little mice! Seven naked little pink creatures lay all wound up together with closed eyes and ears standing up and long whiskers sticking out and little pointed noses and tiny strings of tails.

"Look! Aren't they beautiful?" she cried.

"Well, we'll have to get rid of
them!
" Mother said, peering in.

"Mother! Why, they're darling—"

"Maybe they're darling now," Mother said briskly, "but they're not living here anymore.
We
are."

"Goodness, there's plenty of room for everybody," Marly said.

"Mice are dirty," Mother said, and actually shuddered.

Marly didn't always know when not to argue, but this time she knew. She and Joe had read a story about some children who had mice for pets. She said no more to Mother but thought to herself:
I'll talk to Joe and he can find a box. We'll teach these little mice to be as clean as pins—and to do tricks. Then Mother will just see how wrong she was.

"Well, we'd better go down and get busy," Mother said. "We'll go over the whole kitchen first."

When Joe and Daddy came in, they were all excited about the discoveries they had made outside. Daddy's cheeks looked red and his eyes looked brighter than Marly had ever seen them. "There's an old buggy out there, Lee, in perfect condition," Daddy said. "You always said how much you liked riding around in that buggy. Mr. Chris said we could borrow a horse sometimes."

"There's a sleigh, too. It's still even got all its plush on," Joe said.

"There are a whole lot of good tools in that workshop against the barn," Daddy said. "Rusted, some of 'em, but mostly pretty good."

"John always loved tools," Mother said. "He was so fussy he wouldn't let anybody else touch his things." She was on the floor by a bucket of suds, wiping the floor, and Marly saw the look on her face. She looked as if she might cry, and Marly thought,
Oh, dear!
But instead Mother only said, "It's amazing how much everything's the same, after all this time. The pattern of this floor ... my room ... Dale, there's even a pile of my old letters in one of the dresser drawers, all surrounded with mice." Her voice got brisk. "Joe, there's a whole family of baby mice in a drawer in the first bedroom. You can get rid of them and set all those traps you brought."

Marly trembled. "I'll show Joe where they are," she said.

You'd have thought Mother read her mind. "We are
not
going to keep those baby mice, Marly, and that's that," she said.

"I should say not," Daddy said.

Marly felt them watching her as she started up the narrow little stairs after Joe. They were thinking of all the funny little animals, stray cats and dogs and things, she had always wanted to bring in and keep. She whispered right into Joe's ear: "Joe, they're
darling.
And nobody even needs to know. We can get a box or something and they can live in it. We'll put a lid on, and you can build a house after a while and put a wheel in it for them to run around on—"

"You're thinking of rats," he said. "These are just old house mice."

"
Whisper,
" she said. "Because—"

"I won't either whisper," he said. "You heard what Mother said. And it's just silly, that's all. Mice make a mess all over everything and spoil people's books and get in the flour bin and crawl in people's clothes."

"These won't," she said. "I'll take care of them. I'll see that they stay right in the box."

Joe looked at her in disgust. "Do you know how many babies just one of these meadow mice have in a year?" he demanded. "I read in a book—
one thousand babies a year!
Could you keep a thousand mice in any box, or do you want them running all over your room and in and out of your pillowcases and everything? One year and you'd have
seven thousand
mice from that one drawerful!"

"Joe, you're making that up. There never were that many baby mice."

"Weren't there? Well, there were, too! I can show you the book when we get back home. It's in my
Natural History Field Book.
" Bravely and elaborately he gathered all the mice into his hands.

Daddy came up the stairs with a trap set with cheese. "Just drop the nest into the stove, Joe," he said.

"Into the stove! Oh, no!" Marly cried.

Joe was already at the top of the stairs. She clutched his arm, and when he turned and looked at her, he saw that she was crying. Tears were running in a real stream and dropping off her chin already, like a sudden rain. "It's people that spoil everything nice in the whole world!" she cried. "Think how happy those mice were in this house until we had to come! That's just the way my history teacher said people were—there were all those nice buffaloes and everything. And bears. And deer and antelope and everything. And beaver. And then all those horrible old people came—"

"Marly, that's altogether different," Joe said.

Daddy stood listening in the bedroom door.

"It's not. It's just the same. Just because mice are little and helpless—"

"And useless. And they steal. They give people germs. They're nothing at all like buffalo." He gave her an absolutely disgusted look. "Oh,
girls!
" he said, and turned and disappeared down the stairs.

Marly stood still. She put her hands over her ears. The tears kept coming. She didn't hear the stove lid lifted up, but she heard it bang down again. Then the drawer in the bedroom closed, and Daddy came into the hall. "Now, Marly, it's not that serious," he said, and patted her as he passed. She didn't move, and when he got downstairs she heard him say to Mother, "Sometimes it makes you wonder, doesn't it? That funny child!"

After a while Mother called. Her voice was very firm. "Now, Marly, you get down here and help and no more of that silliness!" she said. So Marly helped again. When she helped make the beds, she didn't look at that drawer once. It was during supper that she heard the trap go off. Bang! She almost jumped out of her skin, even though she'd been listening for it.

"There it goes," Joe said. "That'll take care of the mother."

Marly tried not to think about it. What good would it do now? And it wasn't hard to get happy again because right after supper who should come but Mr. Chris's hired man, Fritz, to take them to the sugar camp.

Fritz was a name Marly always thought of as plump and jolly. But this Fritz was lean and shy instead. He had come in a truck, and Joe and Marly got to sit in the back. Only Joe wouldn't sit, but stood bracing himself, so she did, too. The white night-world looked wonderful and mysterious on either side of the road. They passed two houses, their windows lighted and shining out over the snowy hills.
Our house looks like that, too,
Marly thought, and knew why Mother had said to leave a light burning.

But if the houses looked prettier at night, why, goodness—the sugarhouse was the prettiest place in the whole world. "It's right over this hill," Marly said to Joe in the important voice of somebody who knows. "The minute you were out of sight this morning, why I just happened to see the smoke coming up, See—" She stopped. Now it was not smoke but the red glow of fire they could see. The door of the house stood wide open, and Mr. Chris was putting wood on the fire. He had opened two big doors and was shoving in huge chunks of wood as the truck came over the hill. Joe was off the truck before it even stopped. "Boy, oh boy!" he said, and ran.

The sugarhouse was a warm, beautiful red island in the middle of a cold white-and-black world. When Mr. Chris closed the firebox doors, there was a bright glow around the edges and the light of a lantern hanging from the rafters. The roof was high and glittering with steam. And in long pans, on a huge stove the whole length of the sugarhouse, sap was boiling high. Bubbles like amber jewels tumbled up and up and
up,
breaking and rising and breaking. The wonderful smell seemed to rise with them and fly out to fill the night.

Mr. Chris's smile looked big and round in the lamplight, like a picture of Santa Claus. He was strong and huge and kind. He put his arm around Marly and gave her a hard squeeze.

"Come on in, everybody," he said. "Come in, come in!"

"Some years now," Mr. Chris said, "are real good for sap. And some are not. This year the run started on the nineteenth of February. That's early. There was a big first run. What it takes is cold nights-freezing nights—and warmer days. Nobody knows why that combination brings the sap up, but it does."

Mother and Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Chris sat around the end of the stove, just lounging around like people by a picnic fire. Mr. Chris told Marly the stove wasn't called by that name, but was an "evaporator" because it boiled the water out of the sap and left syrup behind.

"You can pump oil out of the ground, and water, too. But sap—you can't pump sap. It either decides to come up or it doesn't."

Marly stood by the side of the huge pans. You could look forever and forever into the bubbling, deeper and deeper, but your looking was always coming up again. She tried watching one bubble, all by itself, but she couldn't. It was gone, and another one was in its place too quickly. It was like ten thousand pots of taffy boiling all at once. The sap in the pans at the back looked like water, just as it did in the buckets on the trees, but each pan nearer the front was more and more golden, because each one was closer to being real syrup. Mr. Chris said he had to boil away
forty
gallons of sap to make
one
little gallon of syrup.

"How many gallons will one tree give?" Daddy asked, and Marly knew why he wanted to know. On Maple Hill there were about fifty maple trees. She could practically see Daddy's arithmetic getting ready to start working.

"An average tree will give twenty gallons in a season," Mr. Chris said. "That's usually a half gallon of syrup. Some seasons sap seems to be sweeter to start with, and it won't take so much. But there are trees—" Mr. Chris leaned forward as if he were telling a wonderful secret. "I've got one old tree, up by the pasture fence, that we hang six buckets on. That tree is five feet through, and I've known it to give us over two hundred and forty gallons of sap in one season." He looked proud about what that old tree could do, Marly thought. "I figure it must be over two hundred years old now," he said, and laughed. "But for a maple tree, that's young yet. Plenty of sap left for another hundred years."

Mrs. Chris laughed. "That tree is Chris's pet," she said. "I declare he goes out and pinches off its worms."

Mr. Chris opened the stove doors again and began shoving in more logs.

"Here, let me help with that," Daddy said. He picked up a good-sized one and shoved it in.

"When that tree dies," Mr. Chris said, still thinking of his pet, "it'll provide logs for another whole season of sugaring. Now that's being of some use in the world, isn't it? If a man could be as useful as that!" He kicked the doors shut again with his big boot.

Suddenly, as the heat rose from the logs, the sap in the pans began rising faster. Bubbles rose like magic, faster and faster, and Marly stood back with a cry. "It's going to boil over!" she cried.

Every single pan was suddenly high, great waves rolling at the edges.

Chris laughed and reached over his head where a bucket swung from the rafters by a rope. "Now I'll show you a magic trick," he said.

In the bucket was a little bottle full of something white. It had a stick in it. Mr. Chris took the stick from the bottle and waved it over the pans, and— Marly stared and Joe gave a surprised whoop. Really like magic, the bubbles fell away as the stick passed over.

"Why, it is magic!" Marly cried.

Daddy laughed. "Cream, Chris?" he asked.

"I know," Joe said. "I read about that in science. It's the fat breaking the surface tension."