Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics)

by Sorensen, Virginia

  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.

  6. Journey for Meadow Boots

  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.

  At first she really thought a girl could and tried it once or twice. But in Pittsburgh she felt terribly little and worried, especially after one day when she got off the streetcar in the wrong place. The policeman she asked was very nice. But Mother was upset. Joe never got off the streetcar in the wrong place, or if he did, he never told. Marly imagined that if Joe got off at the wrong place he would just start exploring, wherever he was, and pretend he'd meant to get off there all the time.

  Marly couldn't pretend like Joe could, because she was always getting scared. She could hardly ask a policeman where she was without getting a lump in her throat. And of course there weren't any policemen to ask on Maple Hill.

  Once or twice Marly asked Joe if she could go along, but she really didn't expect he was ready to let her go. When he had been to the end of every little road and to the top of every single hill, then he'd be ready to show her some of the little things along the way. The reason she "slowed him up" was that she always wanted to stop and look at everything.

  Marly had expected Mr. Chris would go places more than he did. But he was awfully busy in the spring. And then he wasn't supposed to walk much but would drive in the car to a place he wanted her to see and then walk along slowly and look at everything there was. He whistled to birds, and they answered him and came and hopped along the bushes by the road. There was a cardinal bird that came all the time. "He and his mate stay around here all winter long," Mr. Chris said.

  He knew names for most of the flowers and trees. "But they're not always the same names Joe gets out of his field books," he said. "I just know the common ordinary everyday names that folks call things around here."

  Two Sundays before Easter, Mr. Chris came early in the morning while Marly was eating breakfast. "Hurry up," he said. "There's a big affair going on up in the woods."

  A big affair? It sounded like a circus or a carnival the way he said it. "What is it? Can't you tell me anything about it?" she asked.

  "Well—" He laughed. "It's a kind of beauty contest. You see, every spring the flowers around here have to fight it out to see who's going to be the prettiest. I try to get the bees to decide, but they won't. They seem to want everybody to win."

  So it was going to be flowers. On the way she guessed. More spring beauties? No? Hepatica then, still another color maybe besides white and pink and blue and lavender? No? Another kind of trillium?

  But what it actually was, as it turned out, Mr. Chris had his very own name for. He called these flowers "Easter candles."

  "Most folks—and even Joe's books—call them after their roots instead of their flowers," he said, "because most folks have never seen them the way I'm going to show them to you now. They bloom so fast, for such a little while, it's easy to miss them if you're not right sharp and know when to expect them."

  He made her cover up her eyes at the top of the hill and led her along an old lumber road for a while by the hand. He wanted her to be right smack in the middle of them, he said, for her first sight.

  And goodness! Such a sight! When he said, "All right, you can open your eyes now," she did it, quick. It was more than anybody could believe who hadn't seen it for herself. All over the ground around her were great green leaves, each with a cleft in the side. Up through each cleft came a long thin stem, and on top of each stem stood a pointed bud exactly like a candle flame. Some were opening. The sun fingered its way through tiny green new leaves, and as it moved over the ground, as its light spread, the pointed buds opened. And more. And more. The petals were shiny white, like the inside of a shell. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, turned to the sun.

  "Tomorrow they'll be gone," Mr. Chris said in a hushed voice. "Hardly anybody ever sees them open like this. A fellow named Harry who lives on the other end of the mountain told me about them first, after I'd lived here twenty years or so. They call it bloodroot." He leaned down and cut one out of the ground with his pocketknife. It had a scarlet root, as bright as blood, so that was where it got its name. Some plants got their names from leaves, some from flowers, some from seeds, some from roots. And the oddest things were the ones like violets and roses, named from a color, so you had to call yellow and white and red ones violets and roses. "Used to be a notion that witches killed folks with the blood from this root," Mr. Chris said. "But of course it was just a tale. Anyhow, about witches. But it's absolutely true that if anybody eats it, his heart will stop in a day."

  Marly stared at it, there in his hand, thinking about what Mrs. Chris had said about him and his heart. "Maybe you'd better not hold it in your hand, Mr. Chris," she said.

  He laughed. "It's not that dangerous, Marly. This flower will keep a long time if you put it in water, so take it along with you and enjoy it. Show it to the folks. Picking bloodroot flowers is no good unless you take the whole thing, root and all. Like spring beauties. They fade away in your hands."

  If there were hundreds of bloodroot blossoms, there must have been thousands of hepaticas. They grew in huge masses of pink and white and every shade of blue, fairly tumbling down the hills. Folks thought, Mr. Chris said, that hepatica leaves were good for liver medicine because the leaves were the shape of livers. "So it's even called 'liverwort,' sometimes," he said, "that pretty flower! But it's got more names than you can shake a stick at. Some say it's a 'herb-trinity' because of the three leaves. Some call it a 'squirrel cup.' And some call it a 'mouse-ear.' Take your choice."

  The very first trillium to bloom was deep red, which was likely why folks call it a "wake-robin." Then the white ones were everywhere, covering the floor of the woods thicker than the bloodroot flowers. Some were huge, at least six inches wide altogether.

  Mr. Chris knew where they grew the biggest. And he knew where to go to find little tiny ones, no bigger than apple blossoms, that were painted pink in their middles.

  Mother smiled when Marly marveled at all the things Mr. Chris knew. "That's how Grandma was," she said. "She wrote down in her journal every day what had come up in the garden and what was in bloom in the woods and the fields, so finally she could look back in her journal and tell when any flower had bloomed any year. Then she could be watching for each one to come again."

  "But Mr. Chris says you have to really watch," Marly said. "Some years things are early, and some years things are late."

  "That's true, of course. I remember Grandma saying you couldn't bring things out of the ground until they were ready."

  "Of course you can help," Marly said seriously. "Today I went all around helping trilliums."

  It was true, and she had to explain.
The flowers had to push their stems up through layers and layers of old brown leaves, and sometimes one of the leaves was extra tough and wouldn't move off, so the poor flowers were stuck tight together and couldn't open. The minute Marly broke off the tight old leaves, the flowers opened right away. It was a lovely thing to do, though such flowers always looked rather wrinkled and hurt for a day or so. The jack-in-the-pulpit had the same kind of trouble. Rescuing those odd little jacks, so stiff and tall under the green or purple striped awnings of their pulpits, was more fun than a picnic, though Joe said he'd never in his life heard of doing anything so silly.

  She did it because Mr. Chris made her feel as if every flower was a particular old friend. It was grand to see his face when he noticed something for the first time that year. He could tell things apart that looked exactly alike to Marly—at least for a while—like Dutchman's-breeches and squirrel corn, and Solomon's seal and twisted-stalk with their tiny bells, and violets! Goodness, suddenly everywhere there were violets so thick you could hardly walk without stepping on them. They were white and yellow and blue and purple and spotted and striped. Some were tiny, and some were huge. And one tall yellow flower was called a dogtooth violet but was different and was really an adders-tongue.

  Marly brought Mother a different bouquet every day they were at Maple Hill.

  Sometimes when she walked near home on the first little ridge, she'd get a strange feeling about the world. There were lots of little roads that kept turning in among the trees and brambles and flowers. They were called lumber roads because trucks and wagons had made them years before when the land was timbered. Now trees were growing up again, but there were tangled old limbs in piles and ancient stumps overgrown with lichens and moss and little green leaves and ferns. If she stopped in the middle of all the thousands of things growing in every direction, she got what she called the "push-feeling." Everything was pushing up into the sun, trying to grow taller and bigger. She had never thought about it before in all her life, but all the miracles every week made her think about it. At first the wet brown leaves had lain over everything, everywhere, and then suddenly the peepholes started showing, and then through the peepholes came leaves and stems.

  When she told Mr. Chris about the "push-feeling," he looked very serious about it. "Everything has its own sap, I guess," he said. "It's got to rise, that's all. Nobody knows why. It's like the sun in the morning."

  Marly's really scary adventure happened during Easter vacation. One day she was on the lumber road back of the house when she saw something new and different that even Mr. Chris hadn't mentioned. Bright yellow. A different flower. It was beyond the old pasture, near the woods. It made her laugh to think of maybe finding a flower Mr. Chris had never met. She walked toward it, along the rail fence that marked the edge of Grandma's land. Rail fences were good to keep, Mr. Chris said, because bushes and little trees and things grew in all the corners, on both sides, and made safe places for building nests—as safe as thornbushes. Squirrels could run along the fences, too. Marly saw them trotting along the tops as if they thought the fences were their own special little highways.

  At the bottom of the hill she saw the yellow flowers over the fence. They looked like puddles of gold in among the cattail leaves. She climbed over the fence and tried to go straight out toward one bunch of flowers. But the ground was all oozy underfoot. She felt with her shoe for a firm grassy place. And another one. And another. Finally she could reach the flowers if she stretched, and began to gather some. They looked just like buttercups now she was close, only bigger, with the same bright shine on their petals. Suddenly she heard something and looked up. It sounded like buffalo running in a herd, just the way they ran in the movies, pounding all together ... But here, for goodness' sakes, there weren't any buffalo.

  Then she saw them coming. Not buffalo. Just cows, young white-faced cows in a great crowd. And they were coming straight for her!

  She dropped the flowers and started to make for the fence, but her feet went in. There wasn't time to search for the dry grassy places now. She splashed. Her feet sank at every step. She heard herself cry out and could hear her own breathing. She felt one shoe come off, deep in the mud. And then she stood on a little island of grass, too scared to move another step.

  The cows had come pounding up to the very edge of the little swamp. There they brought up suddenly, all together. The ones in back pushed up into the front row to stare at her. They stood looking and looking, the whole big bunch of them, with round, wide eyes.

  She stared back at them. They didn't move, except sometimes to toss their heads as if they were angry at her for being in a place where she didn't belong. Did cows object to people who picked their flowers? she wondered. Come to think of it, she had heard of yellow flowers called cowslips; maybe this was their special flower.

  "Git! Go away!" she cried and waved her arms at them.

  They looked at each other in a kind of amazement and then back at her. But they didn't move away. They only moved a little closer.

  "Git!" she cried, the way she had always done to nippy dogs who chased her on her bicycle. She took one careful step toward the fence, and the whole long row of them began moving again. How in the world was she ever going to get back over that fence? It seemed a mile away, and those cows didn't seem to want her to get there. The ends of the row moved in a little, so she stood in the center of their wide half-circle. Their eyes were like footlights, and she was right in the very middle of the stage.

  Another careful step, and they all moved again. One spoke to her in a low voice. "Mooooooooooo!"

  She began to talk to herself, saying, "They're not mean little cows at all. They're just curious."

  But the reason she said it was because she really wasn't sure. They could just close in, if they wanted to, and tramp her under. Nobody would ever know where she had disappeared. Great, long shivers began to go over her from her head to her heels. Oh, Joe! she thought. If only he were here now! Once Joe had been with her when a cow came running over a field, and he just stood still and faced her, as brave as could be. And she stopped and mooed at him. He said, "I'll keep her interested while you get away, Marly." And he did. When she was over the fence, she turned around to see what he'd do to escape himself, and he had walked right straight up to that cow and was rubbing her long nose!

  She would as soon have touched a lion.

  But these cows were lots littler than that other one. They weren't much more than calves, she knew. But there were so many of them, and whatever one did, all the rest hurried to do it, too. One shook its head, and so did all the others. One took a step, and every single one of them took a step.

  She tried another hummock. It was firm under her foot. But every cow moved as she took that one step. She could practically feel them breathing. How huge and steady and unblinking were their eyes!

  I'll never go anywhere without Joe again, she thought, or without Mother, or Daddy, or Mr. Chris.

  Then the horrible thought came that maybe she would never go anywhere again at all, with or without anybody. All the rest of time she would just be stuck in this terrible swamp...

  "Git! Go away!" she cried again, and shook both her arms at them.

  "Mooooo!" one said, and lifted its nose as it spoke as if making a signal to somebody far off. It tossed its head. Every cow in the circle tossed its head then and said, "Mooooo!" It was terrible.

  "Please let me get to the fence. Let me get to the fence," Marly whispered to herself, like a prayer, and looked carefully at every green spot between her and the beautiful rails where a squirrel was running, stopping to watch her a minute and then trotting on again. If she jumped quickly there—and there—and if she didn't slip and fall—then she would be at the fence.

  She had to try. There was nothing else to do.

  She took a deep breath and looked straight at the cows and spoke in a low voice as friendly (and shaky) as it could be. "My name is Marline," she said, "but everybody calls me Marly. Do you belong
to Mr. Chris? I'll bet you're Mr. Chris's cows, aren't you? I heard him telling Mother how many nice calves he had." They looked very interested. Some of them glanced at each other, and one of them actually nodded. Then they all nodded, the whole row. She took a step.

  The whole row moved again.

  I've got to—I've got to ... Help me get to that fence. And she turned quickly and made one big leap, and another, and splashed and sank and ran through the water and the cattails, and clung to the fence. And then she was up and over.

  Instantly the whole bunch of cows were right by the fence, looking at her. But she was safe.

  She sat down on the ground, shivering horribly. And the row of cows looked very pleased, really, and satisfied just to see what she meant to do next. Now she saw how funny they looked, young and curious and wide-eyed. They were exactly like a row of children looking over the fences at the zoo. She smiled at them, knowing they couldn't get over that fence. She was rather surprised when they didn't smile back.

  All the time she crossed the field, they stood watching her. She could tell how wonderful and interesting they thought she was, all muddy and barefoot, and now she really knew they hadn't meant to worry her. They were just full of pushing, too, and they would have been sorry if they had pushed her into that swamp and lost her in the mud. She could see now how it had been. They had heard somebody strange splashing around in their drinking place and had to find out who it was.

  Now she could laugh.

  When she told the family at supper, everybody laughed. But Mother said it was a shame to lose her shoes, even though they were old ones. When she told Mr. Chris the next day, he said he'd take her over and introduce her to those cows properly, which he did. With him there she didn't mind facing the whole circle of them, although she did hang on to Mr. Chris's big hand.