Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) (6 page)

There was some gravel on the hill where they had stopped before, and the car went right along. But Mother stopped part of the way up the hill and said Marly and Joe could run up to the sugarhouse and see if Mr. Chris was there. But he wasn't. The buckets had been taken down from the trees and lay upside down on the ground. The big pans were turned over, and the fire was out.

Joe felt as sad as Marly did, she could tell. It was sad to see a place all empty and cold that had been so bright and warm before.

"Next year we'll see it again," Marly said.

"Sure. Mr. Chris will tell us the minute the sap's up," Joe said.

But when they came sadly out of the sugarhouse, a wonderful thing happened. Just a few feet away, looking at them, stood a deer. It stood absolutely still with its ears and its head up. On its face was the most surprised expression Marly ever saw.

"Look!" she cried.

The deer leaped and turned and went off through the trees. It made great leaps without half trying, like a dancer in a ballet. Its white tail went up and down, up and down.

"Why didn't you just shut up?" Joe demanded. "You scared it off. I saw it as soon as you did; why did you say for
me
to look?"

"It was so lovely," she said.

He went marching off ahead as if she should feel ashamed. "Next time I'll just nudge you, Joe," she said. "But I was so excited this time. I'll tell Mr. Chris I saw the first miracle all by myself."

Then, in a little while, there was Daddy. He heard the car coming and came running down the hill to meet them, laughing and waving his arms.

"Dale, your own cooking is good for you," Mother said.

"It's Chrissie's dinners," he said, "and the air." He looked glad to see them, like some of the people you see in railroad stations. He hadn't looked like that at all when he first came home again.

"Look there," he said, turning around at the door, "look out over that swamp, Lee. See the color? That misty red? Chris says that's spring."

Before dinner he took them out to see skunk cabbages.

You'd think something named a skunk cabbage would be ugly and stinky, and Daddy said they sort of were, but they were interesting, too. "Ugly and—" He paused and laughed and said, "Well, you'll see. Ugly and
beautiful.
"

They were growing out of the ground along a little stream that was flooding down the valley just over Maple Hill behind the house. They had tight, smooth horns thrusting up here and there where the snow had all disappeared. They were green with dark-red designs. "Chris says they're the first real spring, after the sap," Daddy said.

Chris says ... Chris says ... Marly saw Mother smile when he said it over and over. They all went around the house and the yard to see everything Daddy had done. No trace of dust remained—no mouse-leavings. The steps were mended. Mother said, "Dale, what shining windows! We'll see the sunset tonight." Then she took out the nice red and white curtains she had brought.

Daddy not only had a fire in the kitchen but in the living room too. The stove in there was called a Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin, who invented it with the help of a mouse—which Marly told Joe right away. (Only Joe said that was just a story in a book and wasn't true in the least.) Anyhow, that stove was like a little fireplace with little carved doors on its front and a nice place on it where you could put your feet to dry. "Oh," Marly sighed, "this is the nicest, prettiest, most comfortable house in the whole world. Can we stay up late? Can we?
Real late?
"

After supper the Chrises came over. They all sat around. Mr. Chris said he'd "pulled the buckets" in the sugarbush the day before because the buds were coming out on all the trees. "When the sap gets buddy, it's too strong and dark to be good anymore," he said. "Only thing it's good for then is to boil down and sell to factories to put in chewing tobacco. But it's not worth the trouble."

"This is just like old times when your grandma was here, Lee," Chrissie said. "It's wonderful having your young ones, but I keep looking around for her. I wish we could have the young ones and the old ones, too."

Mr. Chris shook his head and smiled. "Let the young ones have it now," he said. "If all us old folks stayed around, we'd soon fill the world up, like mice."

Marly looked at him, quick.

"Sssh, Chris, don't start the mice again," Mother said.

But it was for Marly he had said it. She knew what he had meant: There were important things, and then there were things not so important after all.

When Marly woke up the next morning, there was another miracle right outside her window. The sun was coming up, and it was clear and frosty out. And there were ten million little crystals shining on every single branch of every single tree, down to the littlest twig. The tree right next to her window was a wilderness of shining threads, as if every branch, every twig, was spun from ice. Among the threads hopped the cold little black figures of the birds.

Marly felt as if she could never in the world look at it long enough.

She heard the door downstairs open and close again. Was Daddy going out into all that icy cold? When he first came home, he was always having chills, she remembered, and had to stay in bed mornings with the hot pad at his feet. Now there he went, out into a world of solid ice! She could hear the tree at her window clicking its boughs together when she leaned close to look.

But it wasn't Daddy, after all. It was Joe. He was dressed in his heavy coat and boots and gloves and had his green earmuffs on. Marly tugged at the window, but it wouldn't budge. So she pounded on it and shouted, and Joe turned and looked up at her. From even that distance she could see the disgusted look on his face. His mouth made motions that looked like the words "shut up!" to her. And then he turned and hurried off up the hill, and she watched him disappear.

Well! Didn't he think he was smart, though, going out on a secret adventure before anybody was up? She felt so jealous for a minute that she felt it go clear to her toes, which were folded up from the cold floor. But who wanted to go out into all that ice, anyhow? The last time Joe disappeared over a hill, he hadn't been such a great hero as he thought he was. When she thought of that, she felt better. If she wanted, she could go, too. Why not? She dressed with her teeth chattering.

As she slipped along the hall she heard Daddy sleeping. Brrr! Even the kitchen was cold. She opened the door, and a blast of cold air came in.
Goodness,
she thought,
Joe is welcome to all outdoors this morning! Who wanted to go out?

Then she had an idea. She would surprise everybody. She would build a fine fire and get breakfast all ready. And when Mother and Daddy came down, they'd stand by the door and stare and say, "Well, would you look at who's up and around so early? We thought we smelled something good."

Plenty of paper and wood and coal. She lifted the first lid on the funny old stove and stuffed in some of each. She would boil water and make coffee and then—then she would just mix up a batch of pancakes!

It was exciting to build a fire. She had never built a fire all by herself in her whole life. She filled the stove with things to burn and then she struck a match. The paper caught right away and flared out brightly. How lovely fire was, she thought, and remembered Mr. Chris putting logs on the sugarhouse fire. She put the lid back on and waited.

But something began to go wrong with that fire right away. Instead of just blazing and getting warm, the way it should, little curls of smoke began to come up around all of the stove lids. She opened the lid to look. The paper had stopped burning and was just sitting there smoking. She found another match and tried again, coughing.

But the same thing happened—only more smoke came out this time, simply pouring out around every lid. She opened one and stuffed in a lot more paper quickly, and lighted another match. Now the smoke was simply pouring out, not only out of the paper but out of the kindlings, too.

Oh, dear! What in the world—? And there was Mother's voice. "Dale! Something's burning!"

Daddy's feet hit the floor. He was running along the hall and down the stairs, with Mother right behind.

"Marly! What on earth—" He pushed her aside with a hard big sweep of his arm that almost knocked her down. He opened the stove lid and out came
the smoke in another huge cloud, simply billowing. And then he put the lid back and reached around to the side of the stove and pushed something—and suddenly the smoke stopped coming. It was as magical and sudden as Mr. Chris and the cream.

Marly stood still and felt her heart beating harder and harder. Daddy stood looking at the stove; then he turned and looked at Mother, and then he looked at her. He was going to be madder than she had ever seen him in her whole life, she knew it. And she had seen him angry enough, so angry he couldn't even speak but turned and left the room and the house and didn't come back for hours and hours.

"What were you trying to do?" he asked. "Burn the house down?"

"Oh, our nice clean curtains!" Mother said.

"I just wanted to get it warm—and get breakfast. I was going to make pancakes, for a surprise—" Marly said. "Honest, Daddy, I only—" Her voice, her face, her whole body seemed breathless with fear as she looked up at him and he stood, absolutely huge in his pajamas, looking down. Then he turned back to the stove and opened the lids again and pulled out some of the things she had stuffed in. His hands went jerk, jerk, and his face looked hard. She waited for him to turn around again and say what he was going to say. And he would be right to scold her this time. It was stupid and terrible, what she had done.

"What a scare!" he said. "You put in too much, Marly, in the first place. Look—that's plenty for a start. And I should have told you about that damper." He turned. He was smiling! "One of my first mornings up here I did exactly the same thing. Now, you See—when the damper's back—"

He explained all about that big old stove, while she moved close to see. Relief flooded over her, and she felt light, light, light. There was such a huge gladness in her that it actually made a lump in her throat.

"You go on back to bed, Lee, until the house warms up," Daddy said. "Marly and I are going to build a fire in the other room, too. She started this breakfast thing, and she's going to finish it." But it wasn't scolding, the way he said it. It was a kind of teasing instead; there's all the difference in the world.

"Heavens, I'm too weak to get back up the stairs," Mother said. Marly saw how relieved she was, not only because there was no fire but because Daddy didn't seem to mind much about the smoke. "I thought the whole house was on fire. You know what went through my mind, just like that?
We haven't got the phone in yet. Everything will burn to the ground.
" Her laugh was shaky. She turned and disappeared up the stairs.

Daddy stood rubbing his hands over the fire. "Tell you what," he said, "you and I'll mix up those pancakes and take a plateful right up to her, and she can eat in bed for once, like a lady."

Suddenly, for no reason on earth that Marly knew, she ran to him and threw her arms around him, hard, and began to cry.

"Whoa, there!" he said. "No damage done!"

But it wasn't because of the fire she was crying. It was as if something all wound up in a ball inside of her had let go at the sight of him just that minute. She felt it all go soft inside. Everything! Even the lump in her throat went soft and went down and disappeared entirely.

"Well, Polly, get the kettle on!" Daddy said.

So she did. And they made the most wonderful pancakes she ever tasted in all her life. When Joe came in, all cold and red-faced, she was turning some pancakes over in the skillet. Daddy didn't ask Joe where he had been but just said, "Come on in and have some pancakes, a la Marly, Joe, all decorated with first-run Chris!"

Every single pancake was perfect, round and brown. Carefully she filled Joe's plate, and it was fun to see his face—it was so surprised. "Did you make these?" he asked. "Gee!"

Now Marly understood why Mother looked so pleased when they liked the things she made. After Joe said "Gee," he didn't say another single word until he had eaten nine pancakes in a row.

Joe always said he was going to be an explorer. When other boys wanted to be policemen and streetcar conductors and cowboys, he still said he wanted to explore. The minute he got to a new place, he had his "exploring look," and there was no use asking where he was going or whether you could go along. Marly knew you couldn't go until he knew everything around. But then he would begin to say, "I know a good picnic place..." or "There's a place deep enough to swim..." or maybe just "Marly, I can beat you to the top of that hill!"

Even in the city Joe explored by himself. But soon he began to show things like the park and the Natural History Museum and the Zoo and bridges and steel mills as if he himself had made every one of them. Besides, he acted as if he had made them
especially for you.
It was a nice way for Joe to be after the exploring was over. Marly was always forgetting, when he acted smart about knowing everything about everything, that soon he would take her along. It made her feel cross that a girl couldn't explore by herself, too, but Mother and Daddy would never let her.