Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) (14 page)

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.

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.