Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics)

by Sorensen, Virginia

  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, b
reaking 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!"

  4. The First Miracle

  "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."

  Mr. Chris said, "Kids are too smart nowadays. They don't believe in magic anymore. Except Marly." Everybody smiled, and he reached out and gave her a little hug. She still stood looking at the fallen bubbles and then at the bottle and the stick in Mr. Chris's hands.

  "Well, even if it's like Joe said, it's magic all the same, isn't it?" she asked.

  They all laughed then, and Joe said, "Do you know what she said today? That a mouse was as important as a buffalo!"

  "She did?" Mr. Chris glanced at Marly as he put the cream back into the bucket. "I don't know but what she was right if she was speaking of what's the biggest bother. See this bucket, Marly? I have to keep it hanging on that rope for the cream to be set in. If I don't, every time I turn my back the mice in this place drain the bottle dry."

  "I'm surprised you don't let them have it," Mrs. Chris said. "I come out and find him playing with those mice. And do you know what he said when squirrels ate all the walnuts from our tree? 'Let 'em have those nuts, and I'll buy 'em another sack for Christmas: He's the same with those mice. They'd not think that cream was for them if he'd never given them any."

  "Well," Mr. Chris said while everybody laughed, "the sugarhouse is a good place for mice to live in the wintertime. They've got to live, haven't they? Same as we do."

  Marly was gazing up into Mr. Chris's face. "You never set traps for mice, do you?" she asked. "Or put their little babies in the fire?"

  "Now, Marly—" Mother said.

  But Marly paid no attention. "You wouldn't, would you?" she asked Mr. Chris.

  "Why, no," Mr. Chris said. "They're right friendly little things. There's a deer mouse that comes every day, cute as a button with white feet and huge ears—looks like a donkey, with those ears. He and I are great friends. When I'm here alone hours and hours, lots of things happen." He winked at Marly and glanced at Mrs. Chris. "My wife doesn't know all about my funny friends," he said.

  "Have you ever seen a mouse with a thousand babies?" Marly asked.

  Mr. Chris looked amazed and shook his head. Joe said quickly, his face going pinker and pinker, "That was a meadow mouse, Marly. I read in a book—"

  "There were mice all over that place. We've got to get rid of some," Mother said. "But for Marly—every spider, every creature has to live."

  There was a little silence. Then Mr. Chris said soberly, "Well, feeling like that won't ever do her any harm."

  "Except she'll have to cry more than she needs to," Daddy spoke suddenly, and reached out and took Marly onto his knee. Marly looked at him in surprise—and so did Mother, and so did Joe.

  "Well, it's time to test this batch," Mr. Chris said, and took a wooden paddle from a hook on the wall. "Then everybody here gets a taste. Except Marly. She gets two tastes for being good to mice." He dipped the paddle into the last pan, and let the syrup run slowly off again.

  "Does it spin a web when it's done, like candy?" Mother asked.

  "Not quite. It sheets off—like that—" The last syrup hung over the edge of the paddle, and a great double drop came slowly down. "Some folks use a thermometer," Mr. Chris said, "but I like being able to tell. If you start using machinery for everything, you get so you don't just know anymore, it seems to me. I've been doing this for forty years, ever since I had to boil in a kettle on a stone fireplace I built out yonder there, in the trees. I figure I should be able to tell without any help, now. Like the trees know when it's time to send up the sap! Now look at that—perfect, eleven pounds to the gallon or I'm a mighty poor judge."

  He turned a little spigot at the side of the pan, and the syrup began to run out into a big five-gallon can. It was a golden stream in the lamplight. Over the can a cloth had been tied for the syrup to strain through. "Here, Marly, dip some in this cup and set it out in the snow to cool," Mr. Chris said. "Here, Joe, here's some for you."

  Marly carried her tin cup carefully, reverently, and set it in a bank of snow. The syrup was so hot that before she got it set down, the handle hurt her fingers. Joe set his on another bank of snow, and they stood waiting.

  "We can boil a little down in the hou
se for a while and then pour it on snow and make sugar-wax," Mrs. Chris said, following them. "I used to think wax was the best treat in the world. Folks around here used to serve it at sugaring-off parties during the season."

  She showed them how the hot syrup went suddenly sticky in the snow, and how they could take a stick and make an all-day-sucker by poking it in and twisting it around.

  Then the taste ... It was like the smell, but stronger, sweeter, firmer.

  "Take some syrup home and have pancakes in the morning," Mr. Chris said. "Did you bring the makings, Lee?"

  "Of course," Mother said. "And a can of syrup from a grocery store in Pittsburgh!"

  "How awful!" Mrs. Chris said.

  Everybody laughed. Marly put her finger into the cup, and it was cool enough. She sat on the pile of wood in front of the fire and sipped. The syrup was better than the wax, she thought. The taste came through her nose, too, in a funny way. "Do you like it?" Mr. Chris asked. "Before, you got the smell of spring, Marly. Now you've got the taste. The sap is the first miracle that happens every spring. After all winter, with everything shut up tight, all of a sudden the trees are alive again."

  "That is a miracle," Marly said. "Even in the park, down home. Every year."

  Joe looked a little embarrassed, the way he might if somebody started to recite a poem.

  "The sap running gives me a feeling I can't describe," Mr. Chris said. "Like it's the blood of the earth moving."

  Everybody sat still as if they might be in church and Mr. Chris was giving the sermon. But it was different from church, with Mother and Daddy and Chrissie sitting on an old beat-up couch Mr. Chris had in one corner, and Marly and Joe and Mr. Chris perched on the piled-up wood. Fritz sat on a turned-over bucket, his boots stuck out in front of him. The fire spit and the sap boiled, and the drowsy heat and wavery lantern light and steamy smell were wonderful. Little fine drops fell sometimes from the ceiling.

  "I wish somebody would sing a song," Mrs. Chris said. "Used to be we'd sit around the sugar fire and sing and sing."