Harry gazed down toward the pond and over the green valley with fields of cabbages blue in squares and meadows going brown here and there. "The first thing I thought," Harry said, "was, This man looks like a tree.' He seemed to stand with his legs planted in the ground."
"That's just what I thought!" Marly said in triumph.
"Such things happen in the old stories," Harry said, laughing. "Maybe he really is a tree. I asked whether he needed help with any of his work, for I needed to earn my supper. So I stayed that night. And it turned out that he needed help all winter long. His hired man had gone away. After a year, he gave me this house to live in, and I have bought this little piece of the mountain around it."
Did everything good go back somehow to Mr. Chris? Marly wondered. He had found the first pair of goats for Harry and had provided the first chickens. "He never told us a word about doing that for you," Marly said.
"When you have done a great many good things, you forget to speak of them," Harry said. "It is those who do very little who must talk of it." He still stood gazing down toward the road, toward Mr. Chris's fine big house. "I became too old to be of much help on his place," he said. "But I wanted to stay here and live, so I sent for my books and my knives. Soon it will be twenty years I have lived here on this same hill. It is exactly as the great Thoreau said: 'Why should I explore the world when there is so much to explore between that road and my own doorstep?' "
It was a strange procession that went along the road at sunset. Harry drove the two goats, on whose necks he had hung garlands of goldenrod and wild aster to make it "a royal procession." Both goats and the hermit himself carried loads of fence sticks for Joe to build his chicken-run. Joe and Marly carried the crate of chickens between them, trying not to jar them too much from one side to another. Even so, they squawked the whole way, poking their heads out of the cracks to complain.
Whatever will Mother think? And Daddy? Just as Marly expected, they came out of the house when they heard the procession coming. There they stood, gazing down the hill. It was not until then that Marly remembered about the band and the school.
"Joe—Mr. Chris says I go to the little school, but you don't. You go to town, to a great big school where they have a huge band that wears gold and red and wins prizes—and marches in parades!"
He hardly seemed to hear. He was beaming as Harry drove his Rosalind and Audrey into the door-yard. "Harry's going to make a speech," he said.
And Harry did. He stood with his wrinkled old hat held in front of him like a man presenting flowers to a great lady. "My father used to tell me that in his country when there were neighbors come to remain," he said, "milk was brought for their supper and eggs for their breakfast. Now that you have made this great decision to stay at Maple Hill, we have brought gifts to show that we are glad."
Mother was too amazed to speak. Daddy didn't manage anything but "Well, well, well!" which wasn't much of a speech. But the goats began to bleat happily, and the chickens talked all together.
"Do you want to see me milk?" Joe asked.
Actually, Joe could make milk come spurting into the bucket. Mother looked at Daddy, and Marly could practically read her mind: "Do you think if we stay in the country, Joe is going to have many of these queer friends?" But Daddy could hardly keep his eyes off Joe.
"Mr. Harry," he said suddenly, "do you think you could stay for supper?"
Joe was awfully pleased. But Marly couldn't help being rather glad when Harry said he had to hurry home to milk his goats and feed his chickens and geese, because Mother really looked a little sick.
Joe noticed, too. When Harry had gone he said to Mother, "You just wait until you know him, Mother. He's the most wonderful man in the world."
"Next to Mr. Chris," Marly said.
She and Joe had the thought at the same minute, and said, right together, "Next to Daddy." Then they linked their little fingers, the way you do when you've said something both together, and made wishes. The wishes have to be secret, but Marly knew from Joe's look that his was about the big decision. And so was hers.
10. Joe Does a Christmas Thing
You would think Maple Mountain was on fire.
In every direction the trees were red and yellow. When the sun struck them suddenly, flying through windy clouds, the brightness was almost more than Marly could bear. The redness seemed to come from inside each tree in a wonderful way; it was the red she saw through her hand when she held it against the sun. The yellowness glistened like golden hair, and the wind shook it, and bits of gold spun down upon the grass.
What a lovely world! Every morning on Maple Hill, Marly woke in the very middle of a scarlet and golden miracle.
"This is the best time of the year," she said to Mr. Chris.
He shook his head. "It's too short, Marly," he said. "And it means winter is just around the corner. To me spring is the best time." He sounded sad, she thought. How could anybody be sad in such a world?
The little schoolhouse stood among red maples. The first thing the teacher had the children do was draw maple leaves. Marly was glad it was something easy, because she wanted to look around at the other children. It was strange to be in the very same room with first graders and sixth graders and all the graders between. In Marly's own class were only three boys and two girls. "Well, now that we have Marly, it is evened up," the teacher said. "The boys will have to behave themselves."
She was jolly and fat. Her name was Miss Perkinsen, which had a gay sound, Marly thought. She was the busiest person Marly had ever seen in all her life. Imagine, having to know everything that six grades must know. Every month a bookmobile drove into the schoolyard. The driver was a beautiful red-headed girl, and she left piles and piles of books.
At first Joe didn't tell much about his school. He was slow to make friends, and he missed his gang in the city. But in two weeks he got off the bus one day with a shining horn. He ran all the way up the hill and hardly got his books down when he began to blow. The bandleader at his school had given him one lesson already, and he had a little book to look at. He blew and blew and blew until Mother said the roof would fly off before suppertime.
"Here we came to the country to be quiet!"Daddy said. But he laughed when he said it, and when Joe finished blowing at last (long enough to eat), Daddy took the horn and tried blowing it himself. His cheeks went out and his face got red, and he didn't make a sound. Joe had to show him how.
He showed Marly, too. Then he blew again until Mother said he absolutely had to go to bed. The bandleader had told him if he learned to blow right away he could march in the band the very next Saturday.
And he actually did.
There was a parade in town on account of the Fair, and all of them went. Everybody in Marly's school went and all the people who lived for miles in every direction. Everybody in the whole county went to that Fair, and everybody took the very best of everything he had made or raised that year. It was the most beautiful thing Marly had ever seen—except for the country itself. Mr. Chris took a huge pumpkin and a huge ear of corn and a bunch of cornstalks that touched the ceiling in the high exhibit room. Mrs. Chris took canned com and peaches and cherries and lots of jelly of different kinds and a wonderful big white cake. Marly was proud to notice how many blue ribbons the Chrises got, and one or two red ones besides. Mrs. Chris also took a big bouquet of her chrysanthemums, golden colored and as big as dinner plates. Mr. Chris made a tongue twister about "Chrissie's Chrysanthemums."
There was a Ferris wheel at the Fair and a merry-go-round and all kinds of booths and games and things to eat. But the best part of the whole thing was the parade with Joe marching in it.
Marly had never before noticed how handsome Joe was. He had a cocky little hat and colored ropes over his shoulders. Goodness! When she saw him lift the horn to play, she was worried. Of course she didn't say so, but she was afraid Joe's blowings might spoil the whole band. But his noises mixed in with all the rest of the noises, so it didn't matter. All the blowings
and beatings together sounded wonderful. Joe blew and marched and blew and marched as if he'd done it every day of his life.
When he marched past, Marly and Mother and Daddy and the Chrises and Fritz all began to clap. He went red in the face, but turned and grinned as he passed, and then started to blow again.
The next thing Marly liked best about the Fair was the place where the animals were. Everybody brought his best animals, too, and his best birds, and some of the boys and girls stayed right by the stalls to sleep. A girl at Marly's school had two beautiful calves she had raised herself, and she polished them up and combed them and washed them as if they were children going to Sunday school. And they won a lovely blue ribbon and a gold one besides.
The horse-pulling was more exciting than the Ferris wheel. Marly had never seen such huge horses in all her life. Then there were ponies and lovely cows like the ones she had had so much trouble with (she walked close beside Daddy in that barn!) and the hugest geese and ducks and odd-looking chickens with crests on their heads and their heels.
And rabbits. And pigs. And everything. Daddy kept saying, "Well, Lee, we haven't even started to be farmers yet, have we?"
Mr. Chris said the people with the best jobs at the Fair were the judges who got to taste all the cakes and pies and loaves of bread and cookies and everything. But Mrs. Chris said the nicest thing was the gymnasium where the flower show was. It was like a huge indoor garden.
The whole Fair was at Joe's school, and you'd have thought he owned everything himself when he went around with them after the parade.
Marly heard Mother say to Daddy: "Thank goodness Joe is happy at that school."
Whenever Marly told anything about her school during those first weeks, Joe acted quite superior and smarty. But she didn't care. Next year she'd be going on the big yellow bus right along with him. And just now she wouldn't trade jolly Miss Perkinsen and the red-headed book-lady for all the teachers in the whole world and all the horns to blow besides. So there!
Besides, there was Margie.
She lived three miles down the road, and right away she and Marly were friends. Their names were so nearly twin names that they decided it was a sure sign of something special. The very first Saturday after the Fair they made a leaf house on the hill, with a red room and a yellow room and piles of leaves for chairs and davenports and tables. By then the leaves were beginning to fall more every day, and some of the trees had begun to show their skeletons, twiggy and brown. It was a surprise to find that the trees along the road were black walnuts. They cracked some for Mother, and pretty soon she sent out fresh cookies and milk.
The next Saturday they made another house at Margie's, on a long flat lawn. Margie's mother sent out chocolate cake.
The next Saturday was Margie's birthday party, and Marly gave her a friendship ring. It was Mother's idea. So Margie brought another friendship ring to school the next week, and they decided to be bosom friends for the rest of their lives.
Margie had three big brothers instead of one, and one day in October the whole bunch of them went out mushrooming. Mr. Chris had to check on them, he said, before they could be sent into town to the restaurant man who canned them with a pressure cooker. Mushrooms were terribly dangerous unless you knew. There was one called the "destroying angel" that would kill people who ate it so they were absolutely dead in a few days. There were "death cups," too. But then there were lovely and delicious little ones that grew in the meadows where the cows had been. Finding them was like a game of hide-and-seek, or maybe more like who's-got-the-button. Some were barely out of the ground, lovely and white with a beautiful pink beneath like the spokes of an umbrella. Every single one had a different shape in some way, like people. Every time Marly picked one, she rather expected she'd find that little fairy, Thumbelina, sitting under it.
Joe was right that he could make more money with mushrooms in a few days than he could in a week or so on his paper route in Pittsburgh. But of course the mushrooms only lasted for a little while every year. Mother made mushroom omelet, and they had steak with mushrooms and chicken with mushrooms. Marly was rather glad when Joe came in one morning and said there wasn't another one to be found.
The lovely leaves, too, did not last very long. The trees became more and more bare. She could see bird's nests that she had not dreamed were there. Then, one night in October, it froze. Daddy had been covering his tomato plants every night, and some tomatoes could still be picked in the cool sunshine. But this night left every plant as black, Daddy said, as the ace of spades. The whole garden looked stubby and ugly. Mother's zinnias stood sad and brown and rustled like straw in the wind.
Daddy didn't seem to mind about the garden much, because soon it was hunting time. Before, he always had to go a long way to hunt, but now he said he would practically hunt his own game.
Marly did not say so to Daddy, or to Joe either, but she hated hunting season. She hated to come home and see piles of bright pheasant feathers and the long thin dead bodies of the birds—though at supper she forgot and ate and ate and ate. The men talked of nothing but hunting for a while, how they went here and there and missed and hit and how their dogs behaved. Every morning early the sound of guns came through the windows at Maple Hill.
Then it snowed.
The first lazy flakes were coming down one November day when Marly walked to school. They touched the ground and faded away. But more and more kept falling. By night the ground was misty white out of the windows.
In the morning Maple Hill had turned into a different place entirely. First it had been brown, Marly thought, and then all green, and then yellow and gold, and now it was white. If she must choose, which would she choose, she wondered.
She asked Daddy and Mother and Joe which they would choose.
Joe thought it was a silly question to ask, because they didn't have to choose. But Daddy said he chose green because of his nice garden. Mother chose red and yellow.
"Which do you choose, Marly?" Daddy asked.
She looked out of the window. It was fairyland. All the twigs had turned to lace, and the trees were stooped with snow. Suddenly a bright red bird flew into the bush by the window and looked at her. A cardinal! The very one Mr. Chris could talk to, maybe. He had told her to put out food, and the birds would come to the windows all winter long. It was, just that moment, the best miracle of all.
"I choose now!" she said.
That afternoon she knew she was right. Mr. Chris came over on his sleigh with one of the extra horses hitched behind. And she and Joe brought out that old sleigh in the barn and even found the bells in the harness room. Then they went everywhere, jingling and dashing through the snow the way the people did in that old song, Jingle Bells.
If there was anybody who didn't know what month it was, the school windows would tell him. After the colored leaves were taken down, there were pumpkin faces. Then huge turkey cutouts were hung up, colored with crayons, brown and black and bright red. When Thanksgiving was over, here came Santa Claus!
"I wish we could just keep Santa Claus in the windows the whole year around," Margie said.
Marly agreed. Besides vacation and presents and everything, it was as if she had three Christmas trees because she helped with three—their own, the school tree, and the Chrises' tree. Mother sent for their old decorations, and it was fun to unpack them. Besides all the baubles and tinsel, there were special decorations to make. One simply went outside and picked sycamore balls and picked up pinecones of every size and then came in and gilded them and hung them on the tree with Christmas string.
Mother said shopping had never been so wonderful, because she simply went into town and took what was there without searching through store after store. She went with Mrs. Chris all one day, and Marly heard her say to Daddy when she came home after supper, "No crowded elevators! No artificial bells! No organs thundering Silent Night out over the buses and streetcars!"
Daddy laughed. "Lee, you were the city girl," he said.
; Mother ran to him and sat on his lap and laughed. Marly felt so happy that it was almost as if it was Christmas already. She knew there wasn't any danger, this year, that Daddy wouldn't light the Christmas tree.
"Where's Joe?" Mother asked. "He can help me get the things out of the car if he won't pinch all the packages."
But Joe wasn't around. He wasn't in the house or in the barn or in the chicken coop or anywhere. Daddy remembered hearing him get his boots out after supper. Mother said, "Why didn't you ask him where he was going? It's starting to snow again."
"At Christmastime," Daddy said, "people are entitled to their secrets. For at least two weeks before Christmas, nobody should ever ask anybody where he is going."
That was true. But when it got very dark and snowed faster and faster and faster, Mother kept looking out of the window toward the road. "Did he take a flashlight?" she asked. "He shouldn't go off in weather like this. You never know. Do you suppose he was at Chris's when I came by and I didn't see him?"
She telephoned. But Joe wasn't there. Nobody had seen him at all.
It got later and later and later, and Marly was supposed to go to bed but nobody mentioned it. Daddy said, "Marly, doesn't he go with Margie's brothers sometimes? Could he be there?"
So she telephoned Margie's. But Joe hadn't been there at all.
"I'd better go out and look around again," Daddy said.
"Where will you look? Up and down the road?" Mother asked.
"Whatever possessed him to do such a thing without saying a word?" Daddy asked. "In winter, up here, people just don't wander around; he knows that." His voice sounded cross as he put on his gloves and boots and wound a scarf around his neck.
"Especially when it's started to snow," Mother said. She leaned toward the window, but there was no use because it was pitch-dark outside. Flakes pricked at the panes and made little whispers together.
Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) Page 10