Betsy-Tacy (5 page)

J
ULIA AND Katie were nice sometimes. They were nice when it came time to color Easter eggs. That happened a few days before Easter.

It seemed to be still winter. There was lots of snow outside, and coal still went rattling into the back parlor stove, but Betsy and Tacy knew that spring was near. All of a sudden they didn't care a bit about sliding down hill on their sleds. All
they could think or talk about was coloring Easter eggs.

They colored the eggs in Betsy's kitchen. Tacy's little sister Beatrice was sick. She was Bee, the baby, and she was very sick. Mrs. Ray kept Katie and Tacy over at her house all she could.

Julia and Katie put on big aprons and acted important, but not too important. They let Betsy and Tacy help, coloring the eggs.

First they collected all the cups they could find which had handles missing and cracks along the sides. Then they dissolved the dye in warm water from the kettle, each color in a different cup. The eggs were placed in the cups for a while, and when they were taken out they were red or purple or orange. The colors were so bright…it was thrilling to look at them.

On Easter morning everyone ate as many eggs as he could. At Betsy's house, they did.

“I ate three,” said Betsy, when Tacy came running over to ask. “And my papa ate five.”

“I ate three, too,” said Tacy. “And last year my brother George ate ten. But this year nobody paid much attention to eggs at our house, except Katie and Paul and me.”

That was because Baby Bee was sick.

They went to church, though, from Tacy's house.
Everyone in the family went, except Tacy's mother who stayed home with Bee. And Tacy had a new hat (navy blue, because she had red hair). It was straw and showed her ears and had stiff gay flowers on the top.

Betsy had a new hat which looked much the same, and she went to church too with her father and mother and Julia. Her mother sang in the choir, and the church smelled of lilies. Betsy liked Easter.

She liked it especially after church, for Katie and Tacy came to dinner. They had chicken, and everyone was very well behaved. After dinner they sat by the back parlor stove and played with their colored eggs.

Katie and Tacy were to stay until they were called for. By and by it grew dark. Mrs. Ray said, wouldn't it be fun if they could stay all night? Katie could sleep with Julia, and Tacy with Betsy. But after supper Mr. Kelly came over.

“Thank you very much,” he said. “But Mrs. Kelly wants the children home.”

Tacy put her colored eggs into the pocket of her coat. She went home and the next day she didn't come over. She didn't come over the next day, nor the next, for Baby Bee died. Betsy's father and mother went to the funeral.

Betsy was very lonesome for Tacy. The next
morning she went out early before anyone was up. She often went out early in the summer time; Tacy did too. But it was strange going out early at this time of year.

Betsy dressed in all her warm clothes, just as she knew she should. She dressed without waking Julia, and she stole down the stairs without waking her father and mother, and she got her coat and hood and overshoes and mittens out of the back parlor closet and put them on softly and went softly out of the side kitchen door.

The lilac bush stood by that door. It didn't seem to be awake. The snow which had melted yesterday had frozen in the night, and it hadn't come unfrozen yet. Everything in Hill Street seemed to be waiting for the sun. The trees and houses waited in a dim gray light. Behind the white house which stood on the Big Hill, the sky was colored pink.

Betsy walked over to Tacy's house and looked at the upstairs windows.

Tacy must have known that Betsy would come over. After a while she came out of the house. She too had gotten up without waking a soul. She had put on everything warm, the way she knew her mamma would want her to—her coat and hood and overshoes and mittens. She even had her scarf tied around her neck.

She and Betsy looked at each other, and then they started walking.

“What shall we do?” asked Tacy.

“Let's climb a tree,” said Betsy.

It wasn't the time of year for climbing trees, but Betsy and Tacy were great tree climbers. So they climbed a tree.

They didn't climb Betsy's backyard maple which was their favorite tree to climb. They went up the Big Hill until they found a tree with branches low enough to reach, and they climbed that and sat there.

Somewhere a bird was singing a little up and down song. They couldn't see him but they could hear him. His busy up and down song was the only sound in the world. Hill Street was still sleeping, but the color in the sky was spreading. Gold sticks in the shape of a fan were sticking up over the hill.

After a while Tacy said, “It smelled like Easter in the church. Bee looked awful pretty. She had candles all around her.”

“Did she?” asked Betsy.

“But my mamma felt awful bad,” said Tacy.

Betsy said nothing.

“Of course,” said Tacy, “you know that Bee has only gone to Heaven.”

“Oh, of course,” said Betsy.

But Tacy's lip was shaking. That made Betsy feel queer. So she said quickly, “Heaven's awful nice.”

“Is it?” asked Tacy, looking toward her. Her eyes were big and full of trouble.

“Yes,” said Betsy. “It's like that sunrise. In fact,” she added, “that's it. We can't see it during the day, but early in the morning they let us have a peek.”

“It's pretty,” said Tacy, staring.

“Those gold sticks you see, those are candles,” said Betsy. “There's a gold-colored light all the time. And there are harps to play on; they're something like pianos. But you don't need to take any lessons. You just know how to play. Bee's having a good time up there,” said Betsy, looking up into the sky.

Tacy looked too. “Can she see us?”

“Of course she can see us. She's looking down right now. And I'll tell you what tickles Bee. She knows all about Heaven, and we don't. She's younger than we are, but she knows something we don't know. Isn't that funny? She's just a baby, and she knows more than we do.”

“And more than Julia and Katie do,” said Tacy.

“Even more than our fathers and mothers do,” said Betsy. “It's funny when you come to think of it.”

“She's a long way from home though,” said Tacy.

“But she gets all the news,” said Betsy. “Do you
know how she gets it? Why, from the birds. They fly up there and tell her how you are and what you're all doing down at your house.”

“Do they?” asked Tacy.

And just at that moment, the little up and down song stopped, and there flew past them, going right up the hill, a robin red breast. He was the first robin they had seen that spring, and he was as red as a red Easter egg. He flew up the hill fast, as though he knew where he was going.

“He's going to see Bee, of course,” Betsy said. “He'll be back in a minute.”

Tacy put her hand in her pocket, and it touched the colored Easter eggs she had brought from Betsy's house.

“Betsy,” she said, “do you suppose he'd take one of these Easter eggs to Bee?”

“Of course he would,” said Betsy. “The only trouble is how to give it to him.”

She looked about her. She looked up, and high up in the tree was a nest. It was a big ragged nest. It looked as though it had been there all winter. But it was a nest; it was a bird's house.

“Give me the egg,” she said. “Which one are you sending?”

“The purple one,” said Tacy. “It's the prettiest.”

“I'll put it in that nest,” said Betsy. “The robin
can take it up in his mouth.”

So Betsy took the purple egg, and she put it in the pocket of her coat. And she climbed up the tree, higher than she had ever gone before. She didn't look down; she looked up instead. She held on tight with her arms to the rough trunk of the tree, and she felt for the branches with her feet.

She climbed to the very top of the tree, and put the purple egg in the nest.

“There!” she said when she came back to Tacy. “Bee will like that egg.”

They scrambled down the tree and skipped down the hill. The sunrise was almost finished. A pale surprised light was spreading over Hill Street. Smoke was coming out of kitchen chimneys here and there.

“Dyeing those Easter eggs was fun,” said Tacy.

“Yes,” said Betsy, “and I saved the dye. Mamma was going to throw it out, but I teased her, and she let me have it.”

“What will we do with it?” asked Tacy.

“I don't know exactly. But something. You'll see.”

So they skipped down the Big Hill to breakfast. They were hungry, too. And for once no one was calling “Betsy” and “Tacy.” No one was awake to call.

T
HAT SPRING Betsy's father built a room on their house. He said, “What if our family should grow bigger? There's a bedroom for mother and me, and one for Julia and Betsy. But what about Robert Ray Junior, when he comes along?”

So he hired a mason and a carpenter, and they built another bedroom. It was downstairs, tucked into the corner between the back parlor and the
kitchen. It was going to belong to Betsy's father and mother after all. Robert Junior could have one of the upstairs bedrooms, Betsy's father said.

Betsy and Tacy thought it was exciting to have a room built on. They played see-saw on the clean, good-smelling planks. They made curls for their dolls out of the fresh yellow shavings. They dug in the sandpile which the mason had left.

That sand was what started the sand store.

Betsy and Tacy had played store lots of times. The piano box had been first one kind of store and then another, the summer before. It had been a millinery store, full of hats made from maple leaves, and it had been a lemonade store, where they sold lemonade. Now it became a sand store, on account of the fresh new sand.

It happened on the first, good, play-out Saturday in spring. The sun was warm over the earth. Robins and bluebirds and orioles flew in and out of the newly leaved maples, singing as they went. The air smelled sweet from the blooming plum trees in Betsy's father's orchard and the plumy purple lilacs by the side kitchen door. Julia and Katie had gone up on the hill to pick flowers. But Betsy and Tacy had stayed to play in the sand.

The sand was so white and pretty that Betsy got an idea.

“Let's put it in bottles and sell it,” she said.

“Where will we get the bottles?” asked Tacy.

“Oh, we'll ask our mammas and Mrs. Benson,” said Betsy.

So she and Tacy ran to get the bottles.

Betsy's mother gave them an olive bottle and a pickle bottle and a catsup bottle. And Tacy's mother gave them a pickle bottle and a catsup bottle and a big fat jar. And Mrs. Benson gave them a catsup bottle and a pickle bottle and a perfume bottle with a blue colored stopper. Betsy and Tacy washed all the bottles and took them to the sand pile.

“Now we'll fill them,” said Betsy, and they each began on a pickle bottle, putting the sand in with spoons.

Tacy held her bottle up to the sun and looked at it. “I wish that sand was colored like our Easter eggs,” she said.

Then Betsy jumped up, and began to jump up and down.

“Tacy!” she cried. “I saved those Easter egg dyes. They're put away in bottles in our piano box.”

And sure enough, they were! They were hidden in a corner under a pile of yellow shaving curls, and some Sunday School cards and a box where a turtle had lived. There was green dye and yellow and purple and red and blue.

Betsy and Tacy ran into their houses and got cups (the cups with handles missing and cracks along the sides). They emptied the dye into the cups and put sand into the dye and they left it in the dye until it was colored. Then they spread it out on one of the new planks, each color in a different heap.

While it dried they sang a song which Betsy made up. It went like this:

At dinner time Julia and Katie came down from the hill with their hands full of violets and hepaticas, blood roots and Dutchmen's Breeches. They stopped and stared when they saw the colored sand.

“Well, for goodness' sake!” they said. And then they said, “We'll help you fill those bottles after dinner.”

Julia and Katie were nice sometimes. Besides it was fun, filling the bottles.

The vanilla bottle and the catsup bottles were
filled with sand of just one color. That was because they were hard to fill; their necks were small. The other bottles had sand in layers…purple with yellow, green with red, red with blue.

The jar that Tacy's mother had given them was the prettiest of all. Into that one they had put sand of every color. The mouth of the jar was wide, so that the stripes could be made smooth and even. It made Betsy throb inside to see the shining colors through the glass.

When they had finished, Julia jumped up. “Now I've got to practice my music lesson,” she said.

“I've got to take care of Paul,” Katie said.

Betsy and Tacy didn't care.

In front of the piano box they put two chunks of wood, the kind that Betsy's mother burned in the kitchen stove. Across those chunks they laid one of the planks from the room Betsy's father had built. They got a cigar box to hold their money, and Tacy sat behind the counter, and Betsy called, “Sand for sale! Sand for sale!” She called it as loud as she could.

At last the children began to come, all the children of Hill Street.

They bought bottles of sand and they paid for them with pins. The bottom of the cigar box was glittery with pins. But Betsy and Tacy wouldn't sell their two best bottles for pins. They wouldn't sell the
perfume bottle with the blue colored stopper nor the big fat jar.

“We'll sell them to Mrs. Benson,” they said.

So when all the rest of the bottles were gone, they went to Mrs. Benson's house.

She was busy getting supper, but she stopped to admire the bottles.

“What beautiful bottles of sand!” she said. “How much do you ask for them?”

“We don't know,” said Betsy and Tacy.

“Would five cents apiece be enough?”

“Five cents apiece!” said Betsy and Tacy. They were astounded.

Mrs. Benson gave them each a nickel, and put the big fat jar on her piano and the perfume bottle on her parlor table.

“Don't they look beautiful!” she said.

Betsy and Tacy thought they did.

Halfway up the hill, Betsy said, “Five cents is a terrible lot of money.”

“I know it,” Tacy said.

“I'm not sure,” said Betsy. “But I
think
that five and five make nine.”

“I'm sure they do,” said Tacy. “I've heard Katie talking about it.”

“It's a lot of money to keep around and not spend,” said Betsy.

After a moment Tacy said, “We could go to Mrs. Chubbock's.”

“No,” said Betsy. “You only need pennies to buy candy. These are
nickels
. We can buy something more important than candy.”

She thought and she thought.

“Do you know what I think we'd better buy?” she asked, after she had thought.

“What?” asked Tacy.

“That chocolate-colored house.”

“The one we pass when we go to school?” asked Tacy.

“With the tower,” said Betsy. “And the pane of colored glass over the door.”

“What would we do with it when we got it?” asked Tacy.

“Why, live in it. We'd sleep in the room with the tower.”

“We could look through that colored glass whenever we pleased,” Tacy said.

So they decided to go and buy the chocolate-colored house.

At the vacant lot they met one of Tacy's brothers. It was George, the one who asked the tailor for fashion sheets for Tacy.

“Aren't you two a long way from home?” he asked.

“We go to school this way every day,” Tacy said.

“But this isn't school time. This is supper time,” said George. As he spoke the whistle blew for six o'clock.

“Well, it's like this,” said Betsy. “Tacy and I earned a lot of money today.”

“So you're going to Mrs. Chubbock's.”

“No,” said Tacy. “We're going to buy a house.”

“A house! What house?”

“That house,” said Betsy and Tacy, and they pointed through the trees on the vacant lot to the corner of the street beyond. You could see, quite plainly, the tower of the chocolate-colored house.

“How much money have you got?” asked George.

“Nine cents,” said Tacy.

“We
think
it's nine cents,” said Betsy. They opened their hands and showed him the two nickels.

George pulled his mouth down hard, as though he were thinking.

“It's lots of money, all right,” he said. “It isn't quite enough, though, to buy that house. I wouldn't buy it today if I were you. What are we having for supper, Tacy?”

“I don't know,” said Tacy. She hung her head in disappointment. Betsy swallowed hard.

“Maybe it's near enough summer,” said George,
“so that you two could take your plates up on the hill. Do you remember how you used to do that?”

“Oh, yes!” cried Tacy.

“It was fun,” cried Betsy.

They had almost forgotten how they used to eat on the hill.

They looked up Hill Street, and the hill seemed to have been painted with a light green brush. Their little bench was waiting in the rosy sunset light.

“I'll go ask my mamma,” said Betsy.

“I'll go ask my mamma, too,” said Tacy.

They both started to run.

“And put those nickels in the bank,” George called. “Save them! Do you hear?”

But Betsy and Tacy were running too fast to hear.